At the summit, elevation 6,890 feet, it’s gulag cold. To the east, the heart of the nature reserve is revealed. The mountain chain running along Baikal collapses as soon as it crosses to the other side of the ridge. The view to the north grows narrow, running parallel to the shore. Baikal: a cameo set into a shrine. To the east, foothills roll out forests of grey pine, spotted with lakes and streaked with tributaries. The climate out on the taigas is harsher than that of Baikal. Asian timber companies drool over these virgin territories; the Chinese would love to get their hands on such reserves of wood and water, which would be like a second Manchuria for them, since they’ve exhausted the first one. Never in our history has a mass of humanity left a nearby depopulated area rich in resources unexploited for long. History is governed by the laws of hydraulics, and if we set China and Siberia up as hypothetical communicating vessels, Mongolia would be the connecting valve. If there were ever a struggle for control of the taigas here, my summit would make a good surveillance post. The Chinese will have the advantage of numbers and hunger; the Russians will have backwoods inaccessibility and their hatred of any threat to mat rodina, the motherland. The little dogs, noses tucked into their fur, are fast asleep.
We go back down through the northernmost canyon. At the halfway point, the walls draw together and a sudden forty-five degree dip in the slope forces me to cut steps in the snow. The dogs whimper, unable to advance. Then Aika launches herself onto the slide, counting on me to stop her, which I do, and Bek as well. The technique Aika has devised works well, and we reach the foot of the wall. Towards the bottom of the valley, I rejoin my tracks from yesterday, which have been crossed – and recently – by a bear: the prints are deep and the animal seems not to have shown the slightest interest in my trail. At the edge of the wood, the tongue of snow over the torrent has broken open, spitting out its flood of clear water. I make a fire to dry my clothes and nap in the wonderful sunshine.
Return to the lake via the geologists’ trail. The sun and clouds are playing chess: they place their pieces on the marble board, where the white and black spots move around with the speed of cavalry charges.
18 MAY
At noon, I leave the cabin to ascend the ‘white valley’, that curving combe of larches that cuts through the mountain a good half a mile to the north. Atop the rocky crest from which flow curtains of scree, the ravages of spring are clear: the lake is a mess.
To reach the summit that looms above the cabin, one need simply follow the serrated ridge. Beneath a Mediterranean sun, I pass turrets and rock pinnacles of Hercynian granite, rotten to the core. Small boulders not anchored to the slope by dwarf pines now roll beneath my feet and I’m afraid of crushing the dogs. By nightfall, after a third of a mile of tapering ridgeline larded with snow-filled couloirs, those steep, narrow gullies and fissures, I reach the summit, at 6,560 feet. Before me lie the arches of the Baikal Range, crowned sixty miles to the north by Mount Chersky. Sharp rocky crests spread out like starfish in all directions. Areas where the snow has melted are covered with the lichens so prized by the deer. A few days ago, a bear passed through the small, narrow saddle not far below. Hegel’s So ist – It is so – is the wisest thing to say before the incommensurable. I like the idea of having climbed up to find out what’s on the other side of my domain. Baikal is a closed basin, containing its own species, governed by its own climate. The inhabitants live on its edges as if around a village square. Most of them have never come here to take a look behind the ramparts of the fortress. One can be content with never going outside. Or, one can decide to go and have a look.
In 1643 a band of Cossacks led by Kurbat Ivanov, the first Russian explorer to reach Baikal, arrived from the west and climbed these peaks one day bearing guns and daggers. They perched on the ridge and discovered in one fell swoop, four or five hours’ march away, the Baikal Sea of which the various peoples of the taiga must have been telling them ever since the Yenisei, the mightiest river of Siberia …
Crossing slippery slopes and unstable couloirs, I find a good shelf planted with dwarf pines at 5,250 feet, where I spend a divine night with the dogs, the lake, the peaks and the starry fire-sparks that would like to join their sisters up in the heavens.
19 MAY
A rapid return: we slide through the couloirs to the first trees of the ‘white valley’. A powerful wind blows from the north, exciting the dogs. A storm is brewing. I’m in the hammock with a cigar and Giono’s The Song of the World when it hits. In a few seconds the tempest sweeps down from the mountains and the wind begins chewing up the icy plain. Within ten minutes, the débâcle ruins winter’s attempt to keep order in the world. The spectacle of this season must have dismayed the Prussian generals; it’s a Russian who celebrated the rite of spring.
The ice is breaking up: the water regains its freedom, cutting channels among the floes or submerging sections of the plain. The rain can’t find its way to the earth. Whorls of water return to the sky in little whirlwinds. In the confusion, the cedars send signals of alarm. Aika and Bek have taken refuge beneath the stoop of the shed. The anthracite breaches of open water show up starkly against the routed pack-ice. Wind flurries roil the waters. A rainbow, born at the tip of the cape, touches down in the middle of the lake, framing beneath its curve ebony clouds massed in the north. Lightning bolts strike just as the sky closes down, leaving only one shaft of light to turn the Buryat peaks blood-red as their range bears up under a ceiling of ink. I have just watched, in the space of ten minutes, the death of winter.
The storm carries its devastation off to the south. The lake settles down. In the cool air, beneath a satin sky, the unleashed wind shoves the drifting ice around, and shards of the former stained-glass window break off at the slightest touch with a rustle like rough silk. The débâcle has released the ebb and flow of the lake. I set my stool on a sheet of ice and spend the evening gently drifting. The water is back! The water is back! Nothing will be the same.
20 MAY
On this first morning of the lake’s liberation, the wagtails indulge in feats of illusionism: they hop about on the invisible scales of ice a millimetre thick that cover the stretches of open water. Towards noon, a hard rain falls with a voluptuous rattling on the humus. The Earth is drinking its fill. The rivers run almost all the way to the lake; only a hem of ice masks their arrival at the shore. In years and centuries to come, these waters that quench my thirst will be churned by the swells of the polar sea. When you consider the voyage of a snowflake, from the peaks to the lake and the lake to the sea via the rivers, you feel like a poor excuse for a traveller.
I remove two blood-sucking ticks from Aika. Life is a business of exacting tribute, and it’s the plants that pay for everyone else in the end!
21 MAY
The rafts of ice will shift about for a month at the mercy of the winds and currents, coming and going, and it’s possible that one day my bay will be closed again by pack ice. This morning the lake is a liquid plain. Not one ice cube on the oily black surface. I leave with the dogs for the River Lednaya, halfway between my cabin and Elohin’s, to try fishing there.
Along the shore, recent events have fostered an explosion of life. The day is full of flies. I have a nap on some sun-warmed rocks. On the embankments, clumps of anemones dot the sand. Ducks have landed in the open areas, eager for love and fresh water. They were living it up down south. They lift off clumsily when the dogs dash over to them. First men imitated birds to build planes, and now the first planes they built are imitated by ducks. The shoreline is in a permanent aerial ferment: eagles soar, geese patrol in gangs, gulls do nosedives, and butterflies, amazed at being alive, stagger through the air. Forty-eight hours have been enough for spring to bring off its putsch
.
In the forest, the path traced by deer and bear tracks has opened up along the shore, a few yards behind the edge of the wood. Suddenly the doggies are barking: higher up on a rocky talus, a bear pokes its head through the rhododendrons. I hold Aika back by the scruff, while her brother cowers between my legs. Courage was doled out unevenly in that litter. Russians are emphatic on this point: when a bear shows up, do not run, do not look at the animal, don’t make any sudden moves, just tiptoe off murmuring reassuring things. The problem lies in inspiration: what does one say to a bear? I’m unprepared and, retreating delicately, find nothing better than: ‘Beat it, you big bunny!’ It works: the animal forages its way off through the undergrowth.
I catch two char at the mouth of the river. We go home via the shore. I walk along with the distress flares glued to my hands. The beaches and bands of littoral ice are covered with bear tracks. I’m not afraid, I know they will not attack me. In case of anxiety, think only of the last pages of Robinson Crusoe where Defoe describes the taciturn indifference of these beasts: ‘The bear was walking softly on, and offered to meddle with nobody …’
I reach the cabin, repair my fishing fly, feed the dogs, prepare my two fish, flick my knife into the wall, and go to bed with The Song of the World. Giono displays the usual reversal of values favoured by all who convert to natural laws: he personifies things and naturalizes people. In his works, rivers have legs and the coureurs des bois have ‘bodies like rocks’.
22 MAY
The wind is busy cuffing a stretch of open water a third of a mile long that runs beside the shore. Beyond it, a chum of floating ice is driven by the west wind, and frozen sheets are snapping apart like loaf sugar soaked with champagne. The lake gives off a scent of sex.
Diggers, borers, crunchers, kneaders and burrowers, scratchers, those with claws, and drills, and beaks or proboscises, the crawlers, walkers, fliers, and those who perch on the back of a stronger creature, and the imitators, the disguisers, those of the night, the day and the twilight, those who see, those who smell: all are emerging from their torpor and coming to see the liberation of the waters the way friends welcome a prisoner the day he’s released from jail. Despite their long sleep, these creatures have not forgotten their roles and reflexes. The insect hordes are poised to invade the woods, and I feel less alone.
In a cabin, life takes on a counter-revolutionary tone. Never destroy, the hermit tells himself, in reactionary mode, but conserve and carry on. The recluse seeks peace, unity, renewal, and believes in the eternal return. Why break with anything, since everything will pass – and come around again? Does the cabin have a political meaning? Living here adds nothing to the community of men; the hermitage experience adds nothing to the collective study of how to get people to live together. Ideologies, like dogs, remain just outside the hermit’s door. Off in the woods – neither Marx nor Jesus, neither order nor anarchy, neither equality nor injustice. How could the hermit, preoccupied solely with the immediate, possibly care about foreseeing the future?
The cabin is not a base camp for reconquest but a hideout, a port of call.
A haven of renunciation, not a headquarters for fomenting revolution.
An exit door, not a point of departure.
A wardroom where the captain goes to drink a last glass of rum before the shipwreck.
The hole where the animal licks its wounds, not the burrow where it sharpens its claws.
23 MAY
Last night, at three o’clock, barking sent me rushing from the cabin, flare gun in hand. A bear was wandering on the beach. At dawn, its tracks on the grey sand.
The open water continues to bring off victories. This morning it extends for over six miles between the drift ice and my shore, and the wind is pushing the ice raft further out. The sun sparkles on the slush, while the beach remains in shadow. There’s no sight more joyful: the first sunbeams enter the cabin to dance around the floor. The sun fusses over me like the dogs. During the day, the eye gleans all these images that dreams will cook up later on.
According to Kierkegaard in his The Sickness unto Death, man knows three ages: those of aesthetic and don juanesque pleasure, Faustian doubt, and despair. To them must be added the age of withdrawal to the woods, as a sound conclusion drawn from the three earlier periods.
Around my neck I wear a small Orthodox cross, which shines in the sun when I chop wood with my shirt off. In my childhood I dreamed of a ‘Robinson Hood’ with a blond beard, who always wore on his breast the cross of Christ. I love that man who forgave adulterous women, strode along with his mouth full of pessimistic parables, denounced the bourgeois and went off to kill himself on a hill where he knew death was waiting for him. I feel I am a part of Christendom, those places where men – deciding to worship a god who preached love – allowed freedom, justice and reason to invade their cities. What holds me back, however, is Christianity, the name given to that tinkering with the Gospel by the clergy, that alchemy by sorcerers in tiaras ringing little bells that has transformed a burning message into a penal code. Christ should have been a Greek god.
24 MAY
Last night I dreamed of a bear attack. They were jumping on the cabin roof, as agile as cats and as svelte as Afghan hounds. Pretty damn horrible. I suspect the newly pervasive smell of algae in the atmosphere of influencing my dreams and nudging them into Gothic territories.
A squadron of tufted ducks alights on a sheet of open water edged by three enormous festoons of ice, then takes off in perfect formation in the direction of Mongolia. A pair of mergansers likes it here in my bay. I spend hours peering through my binoculars studying their punkish crests. Some diving Harlequin ducks come in for a full-tilt landing on a narrow canal. These ducks are dressed to kill, and when they fly off you just know they know where they’re going.
At eight every evening, the sunlight manages to slip into a notch in the peaks to the south and shoot a long stream of russet gold onto the velvety foliage of the thorn bushes. I’m not interested in knowing whether God or chance is responsible for such beauty. Must you know the cause to enjoy the effect?
In the evening, I dine outdoors, before a bonfire out on the beach. Then I stay to watch the flames with the dogs, my hands warm in their fur, until the moon over the mountain gives the signal to go to bed.
25 MAY
I spend hours smoking in my hammock at the top of the hill, with the dogs in faithful attendance. In Paris, my loved ones think I’m wrestling with the Siberian cold, panting at my chopping block to cut wood in a blizzard.
The lake: a blue-leaded window with alabaster panes. Scales of ice glide towards the south. Lying out in the mild air, I watch these watery flocks on the move. Between the scales, the colour of the water changes from hour to hour. Two sheldrakes zip over this leprous display so fast that I wonder if something is hot on their heels, or if they have some important meeting to attend … Why would anyone rather look at birds through a gun sight instead of binoculars?
26 MAY
People who find time’s swift passage painful cannot bear the sedentary life. In activity, they find peace. As the scenery streams past, they feel that time is slowing down. Their lives become a journey that never ends.
The alternative is the hermitage.
I never tire of studying my landscape. My eyes know each nook and cranny there and still explore them eagerly every morning as if discovering them for the first time. I look for three things: fresh nuances in this well-explored tableau; deeper understanding of my remembered idea of the place; confirmation that my move here was a wise decision. Immobility compels me to perform this exercise of virginal observation. If I neglect it, I open the door to the longing to go elsewhere.
One never tires of grandeur: an ancient sedentary principle. And anyway, why complain? Things are not as static as they seem: light fine-tunes beauty, transfigures it. Beauty may be cultivated, and renews itself day after day.
Travellers in a hurry need change. The sight of a patch of sunshine on a sandy hillside is not enough for them. Their place is on a train, before a television, but not in a cabin. In the end, along with vodka, bears and storms, the ‘Stendhal syndrome’ – or hyperkulturemia, psychosomatic suffocation at the sight of overwhelming beauty – is the only danger threatening the hermit.
27 MAY
It takes me seven hours to toil up a crumbling ridge covered with dwarf pines, spongy lichens and flakes of schist to gain the summit that crowns my ‘white valley’ at 6,560 feet. On the other side, the verso of my recto world. The other side is, always, a promise. One takes a look at it as if tossing out a net: to cement the certitude of going there one day to look around. Back down from the mountain, we carry that pledge alive in us: a part of our gaze is still up on the mountaintop …
Lying close to each other on the stones at the summit, the dogs stare at the landscape. They are contemplating it, I’d put my hand in a fire on that. Little dogs are ‘poor in world’, Herr Heidegger? No, only stripped down to the most accurate part of their knowledge, completely confident in the moment and careless of all abstraction. The courage of dogs: to look straight at what appears before them, without wondering if things could have been otherwise. I think about men’s efforts to deny all consciousness to animals. Thousands of years of Aristotelian, Christian and Cartesian philosophy lock us into the conviction that an insurmountable divide separates us from beasts. They lack morality: their actions – even their altruistic behaviours – are considered devoid of intentionality. They live without any suspicion of their own mortality. Adapted to their environment, they are incapable of opening themselves to the whole of reality, and will never have any notion of the world. The animal is merely an impoverished will, without any representation of its surroundings. Chained to the immediate, unable to transmit anything, the animal supposedly deprives itself of history and culture. And the philosophers keep bashing us over the head with the claim that no one has ever seen a monkey interpret a natural scene symbolically or express any aesthetic judgement.
Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin in the Middle Taiga Page 14