Circling the Midnight Sun

by James Raffan

  Given centuries of czarist and Communist oppression, which saw shamans and Christian clerics crushed with equal zeal, it was no easy job being the keeper of anything non-Russian. Travelling along the Kolyma Road exemplified the massive dimensions of Mandar’s challenge.

  Snaking east just below the Arctic Circle for about two thousand kilometres from the village of Nizhny Bestyakh, on the east bank of the Lena River opposite Yakutsk, to the city of Magadan, on the Sea of Okhotsk, the Kolyma Road is one of the most storied trails in Russia, possibly the world, and it’s not a happy story. The Arctic here, as elsewhere around the circumpolar world, is rich in lumber, gold, silver, platinum, tin, tungsten, mercury, copper, antimony, peat, coal, and oil and gas. To access the gold of the Kolyma region, Joseph Stalin used forced labour to build a road to those resources through what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn came to call the Gulag Archipelago.

  Here in Kolyma, so Slava said, there were twelve months of winter, and the rest of the year was summer. There had been a little less winter since the advent of global warming, compared with conditions back in the 1920s and ‘30s when the road was built, but the area was legendary for its harsh conditions. Ask anyone who had built such roads in Greenland, Scandinavia, or North America. It was an ideal place neither for construction nor for the construction workers. If the winter cold didn’t kill, the summer bugs would. Prisoners built the Kolyma Road through cold, insects, starvation, disease, exhaustion—every hardship imaginable, and some that went well beyond that.

  No one knows for sure how many died because, unlike the Nazis who carefully documented their terminal detainees, no one really kept track of individual fates of the artists, scientists, writers, philosophers, intellectuals of all stripes, men and women, young and old, who were summarily convicted as “counter-revolutionaries” under article 58 of the Russian penal code and shipped to their deaths.

  Conservative historians estimate at least a million people died on this line through the coldest inhabited land on earth. This midsection of the road became known as the Pole of Cold and Cruelty. Every two metres, on average, a dokhodyaga (goner) died and was bulldozed into the roadbed where he fell. For this reason, the track we were on was called the Road of Bones.

  Slava and Mandar’s indigenous forebears went about their business on the land while all this was going on, farming, fishing, herding reindeer, moving from place to place with the game and the season, trying to stay clear of the government forces. But they too were subject to cruelty by local Communist authorities and, eventually, to state collectivization. In time, like the dissidents and the Christians, the Native people were herded and pressed into service on the Road of Bones. I imagined all of us—the soldier, the student, the smith, the writer, the academic—side by side with picks and shovels, hungry for thin soup and a possible future.

  Inside the Nissan as the hours limped by, Kassiean wielded his power as driver and owner of the vehicle like a Kalashnikov, smoking cigarette after cigarette and saturating the cab with the incessant bump and screech of Russian techno-punk dance music. The front speakers were broken or disconnected, so the speakers in the back, which were just above our heads, were pressed into extra-loud service so that the music might make its way to Kassiean at sufficiently numbing volume.

  Mandar, Sergei, and I were effectively sitting in one another’s laps with our knees around one another’s ears. Our voices cracked from yelling over the music. Our throats were clogged with a delicate mix of unfiltered Belomorkanal cigarette smoke and Kolyma dust. While the sun was up and we could see one another, conversation was vaguely possible. But afternoon gave way to evening and, in spite of our northern latitude, the August light waned. By ten o’clock we were being bombarded with techno-punk in darkness. We had long since given up trying to talk in competition with the semi-rhythmic caterwauling of Kassiean’s musical divas.

  The window on my side wouldn’t stay up. And so the talcum powder dust—road material pulverized by logging and supply trucks that ran this road year round—billowed in uninvited. The throbbing music, the cigarette smoke, the dim light, the dust, the oily vapours of five bodies after twelve hours in a hot box, the rodeo lurching of the vehicle, the thinness of the seats—all contributed to creeping claustrophobia bordering on panic.

  Fourteen hours in, we had done the wedding and were back in the car. I was fighting the urge to scream as rippling cramps seized my hamstrings. The Kolyma Road. The Road of Bones. It was all I could do to focus away from the discomfort and into the instructive simplicity of happenstance. Skating on the thinnest thin edge of comfort I had known in some time, it dawned on me that this dust we were breathing was not like the dust that used to dance in sunbeams that speared through the old house I grew up in in Guelph, Ontario.

  The Kolyma dust contained the DNA of dead dissidents. That night, circulating in the air were the hopes and dreams, the triumphs and disappointments, the first cries and final breaths of the dokhodyagi, the doomed. We were breathing the genetic coding of long-ago efforts to tame this land and its people. For what? Gold? Oil? Natural riches? Compliance with the ruling powers?

  And then the Nissan started faltering as if it too were thirsting for fresh air. As if in answer to my prayer, Kassiean wheeled to the grassy side of the road as our transport stalled with a final lurch and cough. I have to say that for the first and perhaps the only time in my life, I was happy to be stranded in the middle of nowhere, in the dark, in a bit of a language bind, with four strangers, because stopping meant that breathing fresh air was again, however fleetingly, possible.

  Slava and the other two milled around Kassiean, who rummaged through the back to find what he needed from the hodgepodge of a repair kit that he pulled out of a greasy cardboard box. I had taken Latin when I should have taken auto mechanics. There was no chance of technical assistance from the Canadian, even if he could have spoken Sakha or Russian.

  To get the blood flowing again, and to stay out of the way, I walked back the way we’d come, into the twilight. With each step, I was engulfed by fresh night air and sweet silence, broken only by the fizz of my ears recalibrating to natural sounds and by the startled croaks of a pair of ravens that apparently hadn’t been expecting company at two in the morning.

  In the darkness, on the side of the road, my feet crunched sun-dried caribou lichen atop rich carpets of sphagnum moss, which brought to mind the musty smell of cardamom and black olives. And with the dustless cool air came the balm of possibility and black spruce that I had experienced so many times in northern wilderness journeys back home. I’d never been so glad to get out of a vehicle in my life. I walked on.

  There was such unspeakable violence in the forced making of this road under my feet. But only steps from the scene of such tragedy was taiga land that showed no human mark. Some called it wilderness. Some called it homeland. The politics of resource development brought joy to some, riches to others; for prisoners of the gulag, it had brought the end.

  But in the open spaces, where development seemed distant or detached, something precious loomed in the viridescent silhouettes of stunted conifers against the star-spangled indigo of a fleeting Arctic night sky. Suddenly, far from home, seriously out of my cultural element, entirely dependent on strangers, I was in a very familiar place. I was in the North, in the oneness of the boreal world, with my Canadian Arctic just over the pole. The realization warmed my innards like old malt.

  Against the chill in the night air, that insight brought to mind a constellation of experiences I’ve had across Arctic North America over the past thirty years. The first secrets and the first silences I knew in the Arctic were those found by canoe and showshoe, by dogsled, by ski, and later by snow machine and motor canoe. River campsites. Barren Lands hunts. Winter fishing holes where the wash of the wind and the light filtered through cloud, ice fog, and sky would tinker with perception, causing the horizon to flutter.

  These places were etched in memories of sounds underfoot and smells that whisked me to spots on rain-
spattered maps in my imagination. Awed by place or by the presence of an all-encompassing whole filled with bears or birds, whales or wishes. We ask, in our dreams, am I the first person ever to sit in this very spot? This is the explorer’s conceit, as present and alive today as it was in the glory days of Columbus and Martin Frobisher, or maybe even Leif Ericsson.

  In those books and imaginings of my youth, I learned about the naval captain John Ross, who sought the Northwest Passage in 1818. Sailing north up the Davis Strait between Greenland and Baffin Island, he broached pack ice and stopped at what we now know is the mouth of Lancaster Sound. In the ship’s log he reported that on the horizon to the west, instead of the continuing waters of Lancaster Sound, there was a range of snow-covered peaks, which he named the Croker Mountains after John Wilson Croker, first secretary of the British Admiralty. There was, as time would tell and as the local Inuit already knew, nothing of the kind at that location. Ross was humiliated when the folly of his observation was revealed.

  But the story of the Croker Mountains points to the ease with which misinformation about the ends of the earth got into public consciousness. What the North was and what it was not to the people who lived in the middle latitudes of the earth differed substantially from the views and perceptions of northerners. What we saw in the visual renderings of travellers and explorers and what we read in their accounts could not really be tested for veracity until, as with the Croker Mountains, others followed and found that in a different year, in a different season, with a different set of eyes, the ice at the reported location of Ross’s mountains was actually the eastern opening to the fabled passage to the Orient. The stars in whose light I bathed that night would have been there for Ross. To pinpoint latitude, he would have shot Polaris, the North Star, with his sextant. But sometimes even the stars can be deceiving.

  How views of the North differ between residents and visitors, however, can be much more subtle. Here in the Arctic, as the Greeks believed, we were “near the bear”—the celestial figure. Ursa Major, the Big Bear, points to Polaris, the Pole Star, which lights the tail of Ursa Minor, the Little Bear.

  These bears (which are known even in Polynesia, where bears are never found and the constellations are absent in the night sky) are synonymous with north for any navigator on sea or sky in the middle latitudes of the northern hemisphere. Because Polaris is directly above the geographic North Pole, it is the only star that appears stationary from a rotating earth. As such, Polaris is a guiding star that indicates direction; but also, for those like John Ross with the ability to determine the angle between the ground and the star, this bearing is equivalent to latitude. At the equator, the Pole Star is right on the horizon (0 degrees, if it can be seen at all), and at the North Pole the Pole Star is directly overhead (90 degrees).

  Even in the fading blue of the night sky over the Kolyma Road, I could see Polaris, just barely, nearly 66 degrees over the horizon, for I was sitting just south of the Arctic Circle. With the tink-tink-tink of Kassiean’s tools sounding in the background, other perspectives on Polaris drifted into my mind. The Inuit call Polaris Nuutuittuq, and no doubt the Yukaghirs and the Sakha, Slava’s and Mandar’s peoples, have names for this iconic star as well. But for many indigenous northern travellers throughout the circumpolar world, the star is actually too high in the sky, too far overhead to give them an accurate fix for direction finding. The star that guides us southerners north will not serve us when we get there.

  At most stops along the way during my two-year circumnavigation of the world at the Arctic Circle, I explained to people, like Svafar Gylfasson in Iceland, the Sami ladies on the Kola Peninsula, and the Intelligence of the Indigenous Peoples of the North group in Salekhard, that because of climate change many, many people in the middle latitudes were looking to the North. And for many of us, as a result of popular science programs, films like An Inconvenient Truth, and campaigns by corporate giants like Coca-Cola, the face of climate change—the crystalline image of all that is right and all that is wrong with the North—is the polar bear, arktos, in a warming sea. That night I saw clearly that such interpretations are as illusory as Captain Ross’s detailed relief map of the Croker Mountains.

  During my memorable meal in the Khanty winter house in Kyshik in the valley of the Ob River, a woman dressed head to toe in fur had assured me that for her people there really is no distinction between bears and people. “We were all bears once and some of us will be again,” she said. Maxime Duran had explained to me that he regularly travels in time and space and through the North Star, the portal to his other world. “Just as some people were bears once, and bears were once people, that star is the place where the cosmic traveller can pass through the bottom of the sky into the upper world to have a look around. Let me tell you a little bit about what he sees,” Maxime said, as he drew a map on the table of a place he had never been. How little we dwellers of the middle latitudes knew about true exploration.

  In time, the banging stopped and I could see by his relaxed silhouette against the brightening sky that Kassiean was having a smoke for the road. The problem turned out to have been an air filter so clogged with dissident dust that, when he pressed the accelerator, the motor would flood with fuel that it could not burn for lack of oxygen. Life’s like that sometimes. By then dawn had awakened the green glow of the taiga trees and tundra, and the Nissan threw an elongated shadow over my footprints in the stained yellow roadbed. The stars had faded.

  As I turned from where I’d been sitting with my journal—I’d written “You are here” in the middle of an empty page—I saw a tree without bark standing head and shoulders above the rest. A flash on its wind-polished trunk caught my eye. Here in the middle of nowhere, in Siberia, were a few coins and even a couple of Russian bills carefully placed in cracks in the bark. I dug through a mixture of Russian and Canadian coinage in my pocket, looking for a quarter with a caribou to place beside these other offerings. All I had was a toonie, a two-dollar coin with the queen on one side and a polar bear on the other. Arktos as an offering. In the moment, it seemed fitting.

  The only motivation to get back into the vehicle was the promise of getting to the end of this journey. With its filter clean again, the motor roared strong and off we went. Kassiean lit a cigarette and flipped the tape another time. The music started thumping and soon was mixed with dissident dust. By then the sun had come up, and light on the scene made the whole situation slightly more tolerable. But, truth be told, having been awake for nearly twenty-four hours, I was asleep when the rumbling finally stopped. It was six o’clock, and as memorable as the scene was—of warm morning light bathing small houses and compact log barns, contented cows and a few stray dogs sniffing along fence lines—it was the clean sweet cool air filling my lungs that marked that moment of arrival.

  Everyone in Mandar’s household was still asleep. So after a quick trip to the outhouse, we quietly entered his mud room and took off our shoes. At Mandar’s direction, Slava and Kassiean flopped down on couches in his main room. He ushered Sergei and me up a small spiral staircase to the second floor, where Sergei pulled up a cover on a roll-out mattress in the hall. I was ushered into what appeared to be a child’s room, where the woven woollen blankets were neatly folded back in expectation of a visitor. I was road sore from eighteen hours of cramp, and the comfort of being able to stretch out, finally, took me instantly to a place far, far away.

  12: MANDAR’S SMITHY

  I awoke mid-morning on the second floor of the house that Mandar had built and that he shared with his wife of many years, Fedora Borisovna, and several grown children, their spouses, and his grandchildren. Registering the reassuring smell of fish frying, I closed my eyes again. By contrast to the din and claustrophobia of the road, the quiet of the house, the delicious comfort of the bed, the sunlight filtering through sheer drapes on the window, the occasional raven’s croak outside, and the faint memories of home evoked by another family household gave the arrival of this first morning in Bayaga a
gauzy, dreamlike quality.

  Aside from the muffled kitchen clinks of Fedora cooking, there was no other movement or sound inside the house. I padded down the stairs, sliding my hand down the burnished tree branch that served as an ingeniously installed spiral banister. Fedora smiled and pointed to a wash station near the door. As in every Siberian household I’d been in—perhaps in deference to the dark months of searing cold and the year-round permafrost that lay less than a metre below the ground, where pipes would most certainly freeze and burst—running water consisted of a small metal jug suspended from the ceiling with a metal spigot that released water onto your hands, into a sink, and thence by pipe onto the ground under the house. The toilet was a privy out back.

  As I stood by the sink brushing my teeth, Fedora busied herself in the kitchen, where a table was being prepared with butter and waffles, deep-fried bannock, fresh milk, cream, yogourt, condensed milk from a can, dried cranberries, and a glass pot of lingonberry jam. Slava was heaped up under blankets on one couch, still asleep. Kassiean, woken by the sound of my descent on the stairs, had dropped his feet from another couch and, with blankets still around his middle, had lit his first cigarette of the day. On rough-hewn shelves around the main room were books, birchbark baskets, an ornate hand-carved choron, papers, family pictures, and drawings. And in among all these effects, situated on tables and low stands, were a couple of radios, a CD player, a flat-screen TV, and a desktop computer.