Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin in the Middle Taiga

by Sylvain Tesson

  ‘Snow?’

  ‘Plenty!’

  ‘Visitors?’

  ‘Day before yesterday.’

  ‘Sergei?’

  ‘No, Yura Uzov.’

  ‘Ah, that Yura …’

  ‘Yes, that’s the one.’

  There are dialogues like this in Jean Giono’s The Song of the World. At the beginning of the novel, the riverman, Antonio, addresses the forester, Matelot:

  ‘That’s life,’ said Antonio.

  ‘S’better, the forest,’ said Matelot.

  ‘Each to his own,’ said Antonio.

  ‘The less you talk, the longer you live,’ says Yura. I don’t know why but I suddenly think of a certain garrulous French politician. Must tell him he’s in danger.

  Sasha leaves me a five-litre keg of beer. In the evening I slowly dispatch two of those litres. Beer or the local dive, the alcohol of the poor. Beer is a sedative that anaesthetizes thought and dissolves all spirit of revolt. With the beer hose, totalitarian states extinguish all of society’s fires. Nietzsche loathed this piss-juice because it fostered ‘the spirit of heaviness’.

  With a stick in the snow: The world, for which we are in turn the brush or the brushstroke.

  3 MARCH

  I remember my walking trips in the Himalayas, travelling on horseback in the Celestial Mountains, biking three years ago on the Ustyurt Plateau of Central Asia … That joy, then, at conquering a mountain pass. The carnivorous hunger to cover the miles. The longing to press on even if it kills you. At times I advanced as if possessed, walking into exhaustion, delirium. In the Gobi, I would stop to spend the night right there, crumpling where I stood, and set out again the next day automatically, the moment I opened my eyes. I was aping a wolf; now I’m being a bear. I want to dig in, become the earth after having been the wind. I was obsessively bound to movement, drugged with space. I was chasing after time, believing it was hiding just over the horizon. ‘The vigorous use of time may offset its fast pace’ (Montaigne, Essays, vol. 3), and that’s how I dealt with its swift passage.

  A free man possesses time. A man who dominates space is merely powerful. In cities, the minutes, hours and years are the flowing blood of wounded time, and they escape us. In the cabin, time grows calm. It lies at your feet like a good old dog and suddenly, you’ve even forgotten it’s there. I am free because my days are.

  As I do each morning while the stove is heating up, I go down to the water hole thirty yards out from the shore. The opening freezes over during the night and must be chopped free again. I stand there a moment, gazing at the taiga. Out of the hole flashes a white hand that grabs my ankle in a blinding hallucination – these waters have swallowed so many drowned bodies! – and I recoil, dropping the ice axe. My heart is racing. Sleeping waters are wicked: lakes exhale a melancholy atmosphere because spirits prowl there bottled up, brooding on their grief. Lakes are burial vaults, where silt gives off a noxious odour and vegetation clumps in dark reflections. Out at sea, the currents, salt and ultraviolet light dissolve all mystery in limpid waters.

  What happened in this bay? Was there a shipwreck, or some settling of scores? I have no intention of cohabiting for six months with a soul in torment. I’ve got my hands full with my own. Lugging my two buckets, I return to the warmth of the cabin; through the window, the water hole makes a black stain on the pale ice sheet, a dangerous spy-hole between two worlds.

  Every afternoon I put on my snowshoes. After a ninety-minute tramp into the trees, I reach the upper skirt of the forest.

  I like entering the woods. Sounds soon fade away. When I step inside a Gothic cathedral in France or Belgium, I feel the same soothing calm, a sweetness of being that diffuses its warmth behind the brow and makes eyelids heavy. Something in me reacts to the glow of both limestone and conifers. At present, I prefer old-growth forests to the stone naves of churches.

  Beneath the trees, forever sheltered from the wind, the snow lies thick. I sink deeply into it in spite of my snowshoes. Lynxes, wolves, minks and foxes roam at night. The tracks tell stories of tragedy in the wild. Some are beaded with blood; they are the words of the forest. The animals tread lightly on their paws in proportion to their weight, whereas man is too heavy to walk atop snow. Now and then, the cries of jays; otherwise, silence. They call from the crowns of firs, feathered sentinels on needle-thin towers. They call because I have invaded their home. No one ever asks animals permission to cross their domain.

  Lichen hangs from the trees. Long ago I read a tale in which the author imagined a god who roamed the understorey of the forest, where his coat would catch on branches, leaving shreds that became lichen.

  The sadness of the pines: they look cold. After an hour of climbing, I check my altimeter: 2,461 feet. Another effort, and beyond about 2,950 feet the forest will lay down its weapons. Up there, snow polished by tempests presents a hard surface. The snowshoes grip well; I progress quickly and choose to go up one of the narrow valleys. A few larches survive beyond the timber line. They are solitary here, with contorted branches that stand out against the blue background of Baikal, starred with fractures. The gold branches, the lapis lazuli of the lake, the white, crazed ice: the palette of the Japanese artist Hokusai.

  Sometimes the ground gives way. The snow, mounded over a thicket of dwarf pines, collapses beneath my weight, dumping me into a net of branches where my snowshoes get caught in the tangles. I curse fiercely down in my hole. In Kolyma Tales, Varlam Shalamov, a former prisoner in a gulag in Siberia, remembers the dwarf pines that surrounded the camp. When the temperature moderated in May, the trees would free themselves from their blanket of snow: standing up straight again, they were harbingers of spring, and hope.

  At an altitude of 3,280 feet, I climb towards the rocky crests that flank the thalweg, that line connecting the lowest points along the length of a valley. Looking down, I see ridges serrated like dorsal fins against the lake. Some of my friends live for this alone: gaining altitudes where the odourless air stings the nose, where life hangs between earth and sky in a realm of abstract forms. When they descend into the valleys once again, they find that life smells bad. Mountaineers are unhappy in cities.

  Among the boulders that protrude above the snow, I build a fire to make tea. Side by side, we smoke, the fire and I, offering our spiralling fragrant curls to the ancient lake. During such days up here, I dedicate myself to the pure joy of being: taking a drag, alone, high above the lake; hurting nothing, taking orders from no one, desiring no more than what I experience and knowing that nature does not reject us. In life, three ingredients are necessary: sunshine, a commanding view and legs aching with remembered effort. Plus some little Montecristos. Happiness is as fleeting as a puff of cigar smoke.

  It’s −22º F. Too chilly for more contemplation. I select a couloir in which to slide down again, braking by grabbing at ash saplings and dogwood branches. Back in the forest of pines and birches, I plunge into the slumbering snow, take a guess as to the appropriate heading, and regain the lakeshore in an hour, winding up not far from the cabin. When I see it again, I feel welcome and go happily home. I close the door and light the stove. In May, I simply must climb all the way to the summits of my domain.

  Hölderlin’s epigraph for Hyperion, or, The Hermit in Greece is taken from the epitaph on the tombstone of St Ignatius of Loyola: Not to be confined by the greatest, yet to be contained within the smallest, is divine. In short, after an outing, after gorging on the grandeur of the lake, remember to give a little wink to a small servant of beauty: a snowflake, some lichen, a tit.

  4 MARCH

  The sun’s caress on the window pane approaches the sensual delight in the touch of a loved one’s hand. Wh
en you’re off playing hermit in the woods, only the sun is allowed to intrude.

  To get the day off to a good start, it’s important to remember one’s duties. In order: greetings to the sun, the lake, the little cedar growing in front of the cabin and on which, every evening, the moon hangs up its lantern.

  I live here in the realm of predictability. Each day goes by, a mirror of the one before, a rough draft of the one to come. The passing hours bring variations in the sky’s coloration, the comings and goings of the birds, and a thousand almost imperceptible things. When the world of men goes silent, a fresh tint in the feathery foliage of the cedars or a glinting reflection off the snow becomes a considerable event. I will no longer look down on folks who discuss the rain and sunny skies. Talk about the weather has a cosmic dimension. The subject is no less profound than a debate about Salafist militants infiltrating Pakistani intelligence agencies.

  What is unexpected in the lives of hermits is their thoughts, which alone interrupt the course of monotonous hours. To surprise yourself, you must dream.

  I remember when I embarked, two years ago, on board the Jeanne d’Arc, a training vessel of the French navy. We were returning from Suez, moving slowly through the Mediterranean. Islands and capes drifted by, watched in silence by officers up on the bridge, all rejoicing inside to see each fresh nuance appear in the coastline. Today, I look out of my window with the same watchfulness as I did aboard the Jeanne, attentive now to the shifting shadows and trembling light instead of to changes ashore. Up on the bridge, we asked movement in space to provide us with distraction, while in the cabin, time’s tiny precipitations are enough. Immobile, becalmed, I sail on. If anyone asks me what I did during my months here, I will reply: ‘I went on a cruise.’

  Inside and outside the cabin, the feeling of time’s passage is not the same. Indoors: a rippling of cosy hours. Outdoors: −22º F, the slap of every second. On the ice, the hours drag. The cold numbs their flow. So, the threshold of my door is not a wooden slat separating heat from cold and comfort from hostility, but a throttle valve connecting the two halves of an hourglass in which time does not pass at the same speed.

  A Siberian cabin is not built to the specifications of the civilized world. Here there are no requirements for security, government assistance, insurance. Russians make a point of never taking precautions. Within a space of ninety-seven square feet, the body moves among the searingly hot stove, the saw hanging from a rafter, the knives and axes planted in the beams. In the Europe of Safety First, these cabins would be razed.

  I spend the afternoon sawing up a cedar trunk. Chain-gang work: the wood is dense, the metal teeth don’t bite well. A glance towards the south, to catch my breath. The landscape is at rest, perfect, structured: the grand curve of the bays, the sulphurous streaks in the sky, the stilettos of the pines, the majesty of the granitic drapery. The cabin is at the heart of a tanka poem, in contact with the lacustrine, mountainous and woodland worlds, symbolizing respectively death, the eternal return and divine purity.

  The cedar is slender but must be 200 years old: here, what living things lose in abundance they gain in intensity; the trees don’t explode in luxuriant foliage, but their flesh is as hard as marble.

  Another pause. Last year, on the flanks of the Samarga valley in the Russian Far East, I visited some lumberjack camps. Moscow is selling its taiga to the Chinese. Chainsaws lacerate the silence around the camps, dismembering the forest acre after acre. The invaders slice up the trunks as meticulously as wood-eating insects. Some of these trees are destined for a strange fate: sprung from the soil of a wilderness valley ridge, having weathered a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty Siberian winters, these cedars will find themselves chopped into chopsticks condemned to stuff soup noodles down the gullets of Shanghai labourers building a shopping mall for expats. Times are hard for fir trees. Sergei told me that up behind the rocky ridges flanking Baikal, deep in the Baikal-Lena Nature Reserve, lumberjacks are already at work.

  Russians, so proud of the integrity of their national territory, pay no attention to this underhanded plot. Puffed up with the illusion of living in a limitless country, they imagine their nature to be inexhaustible. One becomes an ecologist faster in the patchwork mountain pastures of the Swiss Alps than dying of angst in the vastness of the Russian plains.

  I also cut down a dead birch; its bark will be useful tinder to get the stove going. The tree’s skin is striped with nicks: has a forest spirit been marking off the passing days?

  By the time I turn homeward, large snowflakes blanket the bristling ranks of stumps and roots parading along the profile of the scree.

  5 MARCH

  Another incursion into the upper realm. I’m looking for the waterfall Sergei told me about: ‘An hour and a half on foot, elevation around 3,300 feet.’ I’m wandering in my snowshoes along the edge of the scree slope, above the cedar line. At the top of one of the canyons in the mountainside – elevation 3,000 – I chance upon the waterfall. The thin ribbon of ice falls from a notch in the summit of a schistose wall, hurling itself into the void and covering the black rock with mother-of-pearl.

  Not a single bird calls. Winter has petrified life. The world waits to awaken. The snow, waterfall, clouds, even the silence: all held in suspense. One day, things will get going again. Warmth will come down from the sky and nature’s tissues will swell with the springtime flood. New blood will beat in the animals’ veins, the thalwegs will fill with water, sap will flow in the trees. Leaves will pierce the scales of their buds; the snows will murmur their desire to rush down to the lake; larvae will hatch and insects will emerge from the soil. A tremendous rushing sound will course down the mountainsides. Life will move along the slopes. Animals will head for the lake to drink as summer clouds make their way north. For the moment, though, I am the only creature floundering through the deep powder to get home.

  In the evening, ice skating. An hour gliding along the lacquer. Visions slip past: plaques of obsidian, stripes as blue as a lagoon, like a perfume ad from the 80s.

  Out on the ice, a tiny island of snow spared by the wind. I collapse there for a cigarillo. The cracking of Lake Baikal sends shudders through my bones. It’s good to live near a lake. A lake offers the spectacle of its symmetry (the shores and their reflections) and a lesson in equilibrium (the equation between its affluents and effluents). Miraculous precision is necessary to maintain its hydrographic levels, since each drop entering the basin must be redistributed.

  Living in a cabin means having the time to take an interest in such things, the time to write them down, the time to read them over. And what’s more, once all that is done, you still have time left over.

  At the window this evening, la mésange, mon ange: my angel the tit.

  6 MARCH

  I stay in bed this morning. Peeping out from under the comforter, I can see through the window the fat peach hoisting itself over the mountains of Buryatia. One day, the sun will reveal to us where it finds the strength to get up at dawn.

  A gust of wind shoves an icy draught under the door. A hermit, isolated? But from what? Air slips through the beams, sunshine floods the table, water flows within a stone’s throw, humus lies beneath the wooden floor, snow filters in via the pores of the cabin, the scent of the forest percolates through gaps, an insect invites itself in to check out the parquet. In the city a layer of asphalt protects the foot from all contact with the earth, and people are hemmed in by walls of stone.

  The lake is booming horrendously. Sitting with my tea, I open my volume of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation in the PUF edition with its orange cover. Back home in Paris, it sat in splendour on my table, where I never dared open it.
There are books one circles warily. Basically, I’ve retired to the woods to finally do what has always intimidated me. In chapter 39 on ‘The Metaphysics of Music’ I read these lines:

  The deepest notes correspond to the inferior degrees, the inorganic bodies that yet already possess certain properties; the upper register represents for us the plants and animals. […] All bodies and all organisms must be considered as emerging from the various degrees of evolution of the planetary mass that is both their support and their origin; this is exactly the same relationship that exists between the root of a chord and the upper register.

  When the lake plays its composition of diffused crackings and detonations, this is what it is: the music of the inorganic and undifferentiated, a melody from the lower depths, the symphony of the world making its long-ago debut. A nameless something bubbles and gurgles, while over the basso continuo of its convulsions, a snowflake or a tit tries out a little tune.

  The temperature drops precipitously. I chop down some wood in −31º F and when I get home, the heat seems like a supreme luxury. After the frigid air, the sound of a vodka cork popping near a cast-iron stove produces infinitely more pleasure than a palatial stay on the Grand Canal in Venice. That huts might rank with palaces is something the habitués of royal suites will never understand. They did not experience the aching of numbed fingers before they learned about bubble baths. Luxury is not a state but the crossing of a line, a threshold beyond which, suddenly, all suffering ceases.

  It’s noon, quite windy, and I’m off. I’m setting out on foot for the island of Ujkani, eighty-one miles away. I’m allowing three days to reach Sergei’s ranger station, then a day to get to the island, a second to stay overnight, a third to get off the island – and three more days to get home. I’m pulling a child’s sledge loaded with a bag of clothing, some provisions, my skates, Rousseau’s Reveries, and Jünger’s journal, which I began reading yesterday. A humanist philosopher and a Swabian entomologist: serious company.