11 JULY
The German kayakers set out again in their perfectly organized craft. At the same moment, four other oarsmen show up in my bay. These men are not nearly as well equipped. Crappy gear: Russians. They’re using refuse bags as watertight skirts for the hatch coamings. They’re dressed like sailors and they accept the three shots of rotgut the Teutons declined (on the grounds that it was too early in the day). Germans and Russians: the former would like to put the world in order, while the latter must endure chaos to demonstrate their genius.
The last visit of the day is worthy of the Balkan cinema of the 90s. From the north, heralded by cannonfire, a raft of planks floating on Ural truck wheel inner tubes comes drifting towards my shore. In the centre of this floating island, enthroned on beams and braced by cables, sits a jalopy. Three Russians in full fatigue dress leap out onto the shingle: ‘Our raft is called The Intrepid!’ They’ve got the mugs of killers, striped submariner middy blouses, and daggers in their belts. The car’s universal joint has been pulled off its axis, tipped 20º, and equipped with a propeller. On this Kon Tiki from hell they are heading down to Irkutsk, taking turns piloting from the driver’s seat. At the stern, a wood fire in an oil drum serves as a kitchen. When they leave, they fire off a small portable cannon, and I contemplate this raft, so much like life in Russia: an unwieldy, dangerous thing on the verge of shipwreck, a slave to the currents – but aboard which you can always make tea.
That evening, at the waterfall, while Hermann guards the home front, Goisque and I succeed in crossing the torrent above the falls. We reach the granite ridge where I’d found a good camping ledge during the winter. It takes us an hour to cover the last fifty yards of uneven terrain, defended by dwarf pines that catch our feet in their branches.
On the platform, I build a fire. The traverse is a lodge for a vigil of arms, one of those places where you make peace with yourself before a dawn execution. The kind of spot where – depending on your mood – you are flooded with either darkest despair or radiant joy. We smoke our Romeo No. 1 cigars; the night is calm, the moon already almost full. Why this desire to remake the world just when it’s going out? Cumulus clouds obscuring the Buryat horizon ripen in the setting sun. The four elements play their parts. The water welcomes the shavings of lunar silver, the air is laden with fog, and the stones shimmer with banked heat. Why believe that God is anywhere else but in a sunset? The dogs are flopped out under the pines. The fire burns higher; night falls. They meet.
Suddenly Aika darts down the slope with fangs bared, while Bek huddles under the pines like an apartment dog lost out on the taiga. The little black watchdog barks in the darkness and we imagine a bear circling our camp.
12 JULY
Goisque, Hermann and I are walking in silence on the beach at Middle Cedar Cape. In his Life of Rancé, Chateaubriand, crushed by modesty, remembers having walked along ‘under the weight of my mind’.
At the tip of the cape, a moment of reflection at the cabin where that soul shipwrecked by the Red Century rotted away. Hermann: ‘A life without ever hearing a game-show host.’ In a clump of dwarf pines, on the shingle ridge that divides Baikal from the inland ponds, the dogs flush out a sitting duck, and we must restrain them from putting paid to the eggs. Aika still manages to gobble up a little live sparrow, to the dismay of Hermann, who has been a strict vegetarian for forty years.
The six o’clock sun has transformed the marsh into forest pools in an Arthurian wood. The mists of legends float across the water, parting at times to release a thousand darting diffractions in a scene tailor-made for a Victorian Gothic writer. In a fantasy novel of the late nineteenth century, dragonflies would become the winged steeds of fairies, the light flashing on the water would be the kisses of undines, the mist, the breath of sylphs, and spiders would stand guard over the gates of the wind, while the still waters would shelter the cave of a tutelary god, and the rays of the setting sun, shooting grandly up over the mountain crests, would symbolize the golden road to the realms of Heaven. But we’re mere men in a world of atoms and must get home before dark.
13 JULY
The Europeans have proceeded with the construction of third-generation pressurized water reactors, relaunched the Transgreen Project aiming to import solar energy produced in the Sahara, and there’s a massive black tide offshore of Florida. I read these chronicles of human demiurgy in the newspapers Goisque brought with him.
Life in the cabin is a profession of faith in a form of energy that has nothing to do with man’s age-old ambition to master the universe. The woodcutter’s axe and the solar panel provide light and heat. Being frugal with energy is not a burden. Neither is the satisfaction of knowing one is self-sufficient, nor the spiritual comfort of enjoying the prodigality of the sun. Photovoltaic panels capture the photons showering down from the sky, and wood – which is fossilized solar light – releases its energy in fire.
Every calorie drawn from fishing or gathering, each photon assimilated by the body, is spent to fish, gather, draw water and chop wood. The woodsman is an energy-recycling machine. Relying on the forest is a form of self-reliance. Without a car, the hermit walks. Without a supermarket, he fishes. Without a boiler, he chops wood. The principle of non-delegation concerns the mind as well: without a TV, he opens a book.
What do oil and uranium look like? What does the containment building of a pressurized water reactor contain? What is the composition of the crude oil flowing from the BP well-head two and a half miles down? Who transforms these forces and brings them to us in the form of watts? Cabin communism means eliminating intermediaries. The hermit knows where his wood and water come from, along with the meat he eats and the wild rose perfuming his table. The principle of proximity guides his life. He refuses to live in the abstraction of progress and draw upon an energy source about which he knows nothing. To be ‘modern’ means refusing to worry about where the benefits of progress actually come from.
The other news in the paper concerns the corruption of the personnel of the French state, who sometimes betray a confounding clumsiness in hiding their malfeasance. Even the valets of the Marquis de Sade remembered to lock the doors of their master’s boudoir. The ugliness of the men in suits and their impoverished command of the language are worse than their crimes.
14 JULY
The sun hoists the colours at 4 a.m., and I raise mine a little later. I’ve only three – sky, snow, blood – and the little flag snaps on the beach, flying from a fishing pole. For the fatherland on Bastille Day, Goisque, Hermann and I down three times three vodka eye-openers. We salute the memory of Borodino, the bloodiest day of the French invasion of Russia – indeed, of all Napoleon’s wars. I organize some ‘dancing in the streets’ and teach Bek how to waltz. Aika, the bitch, refuses to dance. Is it legal to plant the French flag on the soil of Russia? Is it a provocation? I must remember to ask the next constitutional scholar who paddles by in a kayak.
15 JULY
Goisque and Hermann left this morning. Their friendly presence and the constant stream of rowers these past few days have screwed up my internal clock, and it will take me a few days to recover a rhythm based exclusively on the observation of the sun’s progress around my clearing.
16 JULY
Cabin life is like sandpaper. It scours the soul, lays bare one’s being, ensavages the mind, and reclaims the body for the wild, but deep in the heart it unfolds the most sensitive nerve endings. The hermit gains in gentleness what he loses in civility. ‘The less sensitive he was to suffering, perhaps, the more receptive our ancestor was to pleasure, and the more conscious of his happiness,’ writes Bachelard in The Psychoanalysis of Fire.
If he wishes to safeguard his mental healt
h, an anchorite cast up on the shore must live in the moment. Let him begin to elaborate plans, and he will descend into madness. The present: a protective straitjacket against the sirens of the future.
The evening clouds put cotton nightcaps on the drowsy mountains.
Wild roses cluster at the feet of trees along the edge of the forest, turning their corollas towards their god, the Sun. I think of the description of the garden on the rue Plumet in Les Misérables. Jean Valjean has let it lie fallow, and Hugo makes a profession of pantheistic faith: ‘Everything toils at everything … No thinker would dare maintain that the scent of the hawthorn is useless to the constellations … Between beings and things, there are marvellous relations …’
Taking Hugo’s question even further: who would claim that the fawn never dreams of tumbling surf, that the wind feels nothing when it strikes the wall, that dawn is unmoved by the trilling of titmice?
17 JULY
Figure it takes one day to split a supply of wood, catch four char, feed the dogs, repair the boards of a shed somewhat battered by a storm, and read Typhoon. Conrad’s Captain MacWhirr is an anti-Ahab: he stands on the threshold of destiny, accepts the typhoon, does not seek to escape what is unavoidable. Why should we be moved by what is not of our own making? No white whale is worth getting worked up about. Carried to an extreme, indifference makes men seem obstinate, and Conrad’s MacWhirr begins to seem a brute. The captain would make a good Russian hero. In Russia, to indicate that one doesn’t give a damn, one says ‘mnyeh po figou’. And ‘pofigism’ is a resigned indifference to all things. Russians boast of facing the convulsions of history, the challenges of the climate, and the villainy of their leaders with their own inner pofigism, which is not dependent on Stoic resignation or Buddhist detachment. Pofigism has no ambition to guide mankind to the virtue of Seneca or to hand out karmic merit badges. Russians ask simply that they be allowed to empty a bottle today because tomorrow will be worse than yesterday. Pofigism is a state of inner passivity corrected by a vital force. The deep contempt in which he holds all hope does not prevent the pofigist – whose event horizon is the end of the day – from snatching as much enjoyment as possible from the passing hours. MacWhirr, sweating on the bridge of his ship as he awaits the typhoon, might be one of the faithful in this Church of No Hope.
18 JULY
The fog surprises me as I’m cutting from cape to cape in the kayak. The sun manages to deploy its glories, lining breaks in the mist with spiky crowns like blindingly bright sea urchins. It’s weather for being attacked by the Monster of Baikal. I go ashore in front of the abandoned cabin and plunge into the forest towards the marshes, seeking wild onions, rhubarb and bear’s garlic. The mosquitoes mob me. I’d like to drag the people who write ads for mosquito repellant through here stark naked, so they’ll tone down the bull on their labels. The ponds sparkle. The cedars darken the shores, and the wild roses brighten them. I return to the cabin laden with aromatic herbs. The lake is turning pink as clouds mottle the sky, now covered with lavender bruises and streaked with cyan blue. You’d need to be a forensic pathologist to fully appreciate a Baikalian sunset.
19 JULY
A shower on the beach. I’m washing with buckets of lukewarm water when Volodya arrives from Elohin in his little boat, bearing gifts of smoked fish. He has come to discuss a problem that enthrals Russians. ‘There are riots in your French cities! The Arabs are in revolt! Everything’s going up in flames.’ My Russian vocabulary is too small to tell him that things are less serious but more complicated than that. And anyway, are they really? I’d have to explain that these movements are expressions of social anger and that the ethnic origins of the demonstrators may well impress the Russians, but are not stressed by French commentators. I’d have to show him that this is not a revolution. These public disturbances don’t aim to overthrow bourgeois society but to break into it. Are these young people demanding liberty, power and glory? Why are they burning cars in those pockets of poverty? To protest against the savaging of society by technology and the market? Or in despair at not owning the biggest and most beautiful cars themselves?
I remember my forays into such ‘sensitive’ neighbourhoods – an adjective applied to places marked by a certain odour of brutality. The little kids were quite lively and did me the honour of listening to what I had to say, but they made fun of my equipment, how I was dressed and the way I talked. What I took away from such encounters was that they invest enormous tribal significance in clothing and conformist behaviour, cultivate a sense of neighbourhood loyalty, love expensive things, demonstrate an unhealthy obsession with appearance, believe that might makes right, show little curiosity about the other, and have their own linguistic codes: the distinctive signs of bourgeois society.
Ye gods of the woods – to live out here and insult these mountains by paying any attention to such things! As soon as Volodya takes off, I chase away such concerns and get back to my chores and my books.
20 JULY
Today I scale rugged terrain to 5,250 feet and clamber back down again: so much for the statistics. I’d decided to tackle the peak directly behind the cabin. First comes the long and difficult climb through the taiga. I get into the underbrush after 2,800 feet. The far edge of the forest marks the threshold of the upper world, where boulders torn from the summits have rolled all the way down to the ramparts of the trees. The silence is vast and still. The dogs pant in the heat. We drink straight from the cascading torrent. The canyon is growing tighter, giving Aika and Bek trouble with its rock steps and ledges. I sit down by clumps of mountain anemones to study the slow collapse of woods and scree slopes down to the lakeshore below.
It seems that some men check out women’s hips to assess whether they will bear children easily. Others consider their eyes for signs that they will prove captivating lovers, or think the length of their fingers will reveal something about their sensuality. And some men study geography in the same ways.
These mountains offer nothing but a host of immediate sensations. Man will never improve on these ranges. Calculating souls will get nothing for their pains in this unpromising landscape wracked with grandeur, for it is unconquerable. Here nature relaxes for the sole appreciation of minds free from all ambition. The taiga is not a good playground for dreams of cultivation. Developers, buzz off back to Tuscany! Under temperate skies, there the land waits for man to mould it into countryside. Here, in this amphitheatre, the elements reign for eternity. There were epic battles in volcanic periods, but now all is calm. The landscape: geology in repose.
At an elevation of 5,600 feet, I cut across scree slopes towards the peak. Up there, along the ridge dividing the basins of Lake Baikal and the River Lena, I have lunch with the dogs: three smoked fish and some wild onion. Another hour’s march across dried lichens to the top at 6,890 feet, where the dogs and I nestle together for a nap. Until we’re driven off by mosquitoes, the guardians of the summit, who defend it against all comers. Nature, in its genius, has deployed not armies of monstrous creatures, vulnerable to rifle fire, but tiny flying syringes whose buzzing drives one insane.
We beat a retreat down the north-eastern versant and scramble down a scree slope, dislodging mini-avalanches with every step. I pass through a firn field – old snow not quite hardened yet into glacier ice – canted at a 40º angle, using two fine slabs of schist to cut out steps. The dogs howl before resigning themselves to going around the obstacle, and when the slope moderates, we start sinking into the snow. At 3,000 feet, confronted with a suspicious transverse fault, I instinctively leave the firn for its rocky edges, where a stream appears; the river beneath the snow briefly shows itself again before vanishing into a gulf a hundred feet below.
21 JULY
Not one bird is singing. Not one ripple on the lake. Fog has swallowed up the world.
22 JULY
Their silent approach takes me by surprise: I become aware of their presence only when I hear the kayaks scraping over the shingle. Two colossi with shaved heads. They have bloodthirsty smiles but the gentlest of eyes. They’re paddling to Olkhon Island at the rate of about thirty miles a day. They ask me for some tea, and while the kettle is coming to a boil, they announce that they are Shivaists and are travelling along the lakeshore to find sacred sites, since they consider Baikal to be the original birthplace of their god. The funny thing is that they look like Special Forces killers.
My ten years of education with the Brothers have left me enough residual patience to get through the spiritual mishmash, liberally sprinkled with Sanskrit, that Sasha expounds to me for an hour, the gist of which is that Baikal’s mountains are linked to sacred Mount Meru, that the Ural Mountains are a world hot-spot for celto-cosmic revelations, and that Zarathustra built the kurgans – those prehistoric burial mounds found in southern Russia and Ukraine – on the Indo-Sarmatian plains. I admire these believers who speak of such things with the same aplomb as if they’d just split a beer with God in the cabin next door. Since the collapse of the USSR, New Age theories have been all the rage with Russians. After all, something had to fill the mystic vacuum left by the debunking of socialist dogma. Russians love esoteric explanations of the world and will never shrink from swallowing whole any of those theories that professional occultists would never dare even to mention in Western Europe. Russians aren’t the sons of Rasputin for nothing.
Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin in the Middle Taiga Page 19