Kingdoms in the Air

by Bob Shacochis

  No, he wasn’t, not today and never again.

  On East Bay Cay I savored the exquisite waste of time, time that other people were using to benefit from the world in some measurable way, time forged by others into progress and still others into dreams. I dove for lobster and conch, speared snapper, fly-fished for barracuda just for the violence of the hookup. Down in the sand I walked for miles, beachcombing in a daze. I scribbled dry observations in my journal as if it were a ship’s log, and I slept soundly every night, lulled by the constant noise of nature: the far-off thunder of waves on the reef, the persistent hiss and flutter of wind, the lap and sigh of shorebreak. For ten days I did precisely what I wanted: I read. Great books have made me unemployable; I can’t pick one up without shutting down my daily life. In this respect Linda’s influence continues to inform my days, for it was she who introduced me to Gabriel García Márquez (who we sometimes saw on Isla de Providencia at the cockfights), she who gave me my first copies of Peter Matthiessen’s Far Tortuga, Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone on the World, Graham Greene’s The Comedians.

  I knew what I was doing here on this far-off island—I knew how to take care of myself, how to enjoy myself—but I couldn’t quite explain to myself why I had come, what I was looking for. Perhaps it was only a rehearsal for my final voyage with the captain. Or maybe it was an act akin to a transmission overhaul, lubricating the machinery damaged by life’s inevitable grinding down of the romantic dream.

  I thought of Captain Tay, back there on the king-size island of his isolation, about his influence on how I’d lived my life, and about how I might measure the difference between us. Technically, at least, we were two of the most cut-loose people on earth: Americans, white males, sometimes penniless but possessed of the skills and tenacity that would always stick enough money in our pockets to get by, with a powerful and abiding sense of self-reliance and self-sufficiency. We were doing what suited us and what often made us happy. But Tay’s obstinate disconnection from a world he had formerly possessed with such ferocious energy had unsettled me. Perhaps I saw myself doing just that: disconnecting. What is it that finally conquers your appetite for the world? Fear? Exhaustion? Cynicism? The formerly wild places now sardined with stockbrokers on tour? Paralyzing nostalgia for the way it was? Age and health? Self-pity? Sorrow?

  The epiphany of my relationship with Tay and Linda Maltsberger, the revelation that had become as clear and guiding as the North Star, still struck me as the larger truth: Whatever your resources, the world was yours to the exact degree to which you summoned the fortitude and faith to step away from convention and orthodoxy and invent your own life. Tay and Linda knew better than most that there’s never a good reason to make your world small.

  An image presents itself from aboard the South Wind, an abominable vessel with a tawdry history as a drug runner, eventually rehabilitated to run fuel between Provo and the Dominican Republic. In 1980, her owner coaxed the Maltsbergers into bringing the freighter down from a Florida boatyard. They hired me on as ship’s carpenter to enclose the toilet on the stern of the boat—Linda never did get much privacy in her life with Tay—and to help them deliver the South Wind to Provo.

  On the fourth day out from Fort Lauderdale we entered an armada of vicious squalls in the channel off the Exuma Cays. At midnight I took the helm from Tay, and for the next three wretched hours I fought alone in the darkness to keep the ship on course, waves breaking over the bow and foaming down the deck, lightning strikes bracketing us on all sides, white rain pelting horizontally into the glass of the wheelhouse. Toward the end of my watch Linda awoke, stepped over to the radar screen, and proclaimed that she didn’t know where we were, but from the looks of it I had steered too far west and we were about to crash into unseen rocks. Terrified, I changed course twenty degrees, and Linda, storm sibyl, as always so transcendently composed, walked out into the tempest. Sometimes I had to shake my head clear to see her properly. Her physical self, her sense of style—the clothes, the cut of her lank hair, the clunky eyeglasses—seemed so retrograde, so bolted down to the Camelot sixties, as if she still was and always would be some bookish chick from NYU who couldn’t quite finish her dissertation on the urban insane.

  After the ship’s mechanic crawled up out of the engine room to relieve me at the wheel, I went looking for Linda and found her back at the stern. The worst of the storm had passed, and she stood in the cone of illumination under the pole that held our running light, her body swarmed by hundreds of shrieking birds that had sought refuge with us, swirling like snowflakes past the fingertips of her outstretched arms, landing on her shoulders, her head. It seemed for a moment they might carry her away. There was a look of extreme delight on her rain-streaked face, and she turned toward me and nodded as if to say, How marvelous! How miraculous! The world is full of wonders. And then she retreated to the wheelhouse to chart our position and bring us men safely through the night.

  (2000)

  Here the Bear and

  the Mafia Roam

  In the central Siberian city of Tomsk, children play a game called Dead Telephone, whispering a sentence around a circle until someone fails to repeat the original wording accurately, and for the child who gets the sentence wrong, the penalty is “you must go live in Kamchatka.” Meaning that the loser has been imaginatively banished from the relative comforts of Siberia to the very end of the earth. Kamchatka, perhaps Russia’s most famous nowhere, the wild east of the Russian and Soviet empires, nine time zones and over six thousand miles distant from Moscow.

  Tundra. Shimmering twilight. A slow, high-banked river the color of tea, as if it flowed from the spigot of a samovar.

  Where I should have been was on a vodka-clear, rock-bottomed river, fast and wild, somewhere to the north and farther inland with a phantom cadre of biologists, fly-fishing for salmon specimens on the Kamchatka peninsula. Where I’d ended up was about three klicks inland from the Sea of Okhotsk, on an estuarine section of another river that I’d been advised, by the self-proclaimed criminals who deposited me here, to forget about, or else.

  We had come from the end of the road, three hours across tundra and beach, atop my host’s—let’s call him Misha—GTT, a large, blunt-snouted all-terrain vehicle that came into his possession when the Soviet military began to disintegrate in 1991. Despite Misha’s earlier assurances, not only were we not going to the river I’d traveled thousands of miles to fish, in hopes of seeing what I’d never seen before—the phenomenon of a massive salmon run—but we’d be leaving in the morning, a day earlier than I thought had been agreed upon. Misha, who looked like a blond-haired, cornhusking quarterback, had Brandoesque mannerisms; waiting for my tantrum to subside, he tilted his head back and cocked it coolly, peering down the nascent beefiness of his ruddy face, and then chided me in the hushed cadence of the ever-reasonable gangster.

  “Robert,” he said, “I’m Mafiya, Mafiya, Mafiya—not a tour agent.”

  Then he wrapped his hands around his throat, as if to strangle himself, and said he would, if I wanted, take care of my inept outfitter back in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky (P-K), and for a moment I thought, Nice guy!

  At the Mafiya’s oceanside fish camp, when I explained that, to salvage something out of the trip, I wanted to be ferried across the lagoon to spend the night upriver, Misha considered this desire stupid and pointless, but mostly he considered it dangerous. Bears were as thick as gooseberries over there, he said, and I didn’t have a gun, but when I persisted he ordered his boatman to take me across. Rinat, my half-Tatar, half-Russian interpreter/driver, was coming with me. Sergei, our wilderness guide, said he’d rather not.

  Now, standing on a tiny tide-swept island in waist-high grass at the end of this remarkably strange day, I cast futilely for silver salmon with my spinning rod, the strong wind sailing the lure within inches of a sandy patch of beach jutting out below the opposite shore. On the steep bank ten feet above me, Rinat had his nose in the food bag,
tossing spoiled provisions out onto the ground.

  “Rinat! Are you mad? Throw that food in the river.”

  Kamchatka is said to have more and larger grizzly bears per square mile than any place on earth, but Rinat was churlishly indifferent to their presence. A city boy, born and raised in P-K, the peninsula’s largest metropolis, he was employed by a local tourist company trying to bluff its way into the wilderness biz. His employer—my outfitter—let him come out into the ever-perilous, grizzly-roamed outback without a proper food container, without even a tent (I’d brought my own). Earlier in the summer, we’d done soberingly foolish things together, taken risks that Rinat never seemed to recognize—traversed glaciers in our tennis shoes where one slip would send you plummeting into oblivion; edged ourselves out onto melting ice bridges; stood on the fragile crater floor of the belching Mutnovsky volcano, our lungs seared by sulfurous gases. How, I often wondered, was this puckish, hardworking fellow ever going to survive his occupation, here in one of the last great wild places left on earth?

  “Sushi,” Rinat giggled irreverently, pitching stale bread and moldy cheese into the river, making a reference to Michiko Honido, the renowned bear photographer, who was eaten by his Kamchatkan subjects last year.

  A minute later I hooked up with a good-size silver salmon, which cheered me deeply, here in the land called the Serengeti of Salmon, where I had been consistently thwarted in my (apparently not) simple quest to savor a fine day of fishing. The fish made its freedom run, keeping me well occupied, and when I looked up again, Rinat, the imp, had set the tundra on fire.

  I landed the fish, put my rod down, hopped back to the mainland, and began hauling pots of water while Rinat slapped at the rapidly spreading flames with a fiber sack. Though I’d just reeled in the first salmon of my life, the experience had been akin to losing one’s virginity while your little brother’s in the room, playing with a loaded pistol.

  Later, as I planked one of the fillets for smoking, Rinat cut the other into steaks for the cook pot. We lolled around the campfire, uncommonly taciturn, because Rinat had found it politic to give away our last bottle of vodka to the boyos.

  “Here we are with the criminals,” he said, shaking his head morosely. “Here we are with the bears.”

  Imagine an Alaska sealed tight for fifty years, suspended in isolation, inaccessible to all outsiders until 1990, when the sanctum’s doors ease slowly open to the capitalists on the threshold, the carpetbaggers, the tycoon sportsmen, and, of course, the gangsters. Unworldly Kamchatka, with a not-quite-propitious swing of history’s horrible pendulum, is called upon to reinvent itself, and not for the first time.

  As gold had once inspired the conquest of the New World, the lust for fur—beaver in North America, sable in Russia—accelerated the exploration of two continents and the spread of two empires. Russia’s eastward expansion very much mirrored America’s westward ­expansion—the genocidal subjugation of native peoples in the pursuit of natural riches and trade routes. White guys on the move.

  Annexed for the czars by a Cossack expedition in 1697, Kamchatka provided Peter the Great with a global monopoly on the fabulously valuable sable. Within forty years, the ruthless, plundering Cossacks had decimated the coastal-oriented Itelmen and reindeer-herding Koryaks, the likely descendants of indigenous people who had crossed the Bering Strait to North America. A native rebellion in 1731 resulted in a mass suicide, and before long 150,000 tribal people had been reduced to 10,000, their number today, barely 2.5 percent of Kamchatka’s population. Racially and culturally, Kamchatka is as Eurocentric as a bottle of Perrier.

  In 1725, Peter the Great sent Captain Vitus Bering on an unsuccessful mission to determine the relation of eastern Siberia to the American continent. Bering was recommissioned by Peter’s successor, and his Great Northern Expedition, which took years to plan and execute and eventually involved three thousand people, is rightfully remembered as one of the greatest voyages of discovery. Bering sailed his two packets, the St. Peter and the St. Paul, into Avachinsky Bay in 1740 and founded the town of Petropavlovsk, named after his ships. The following spring he set sail for the coast of North America, sighting land in July—Kayak Island off the Alaskan coast—and throughout the summer and fall he mapped the Aleutians, charted the Alaskan shoreline, and then turned back toward Kamchatka, discovering the Commander Islands. His efforts had irrevocably opened the Russian Far East and Russian America for development and trade—in particular the fur trade, which continued to dominate the peninsula’s economy until 1912, the year St. Petersburg banned the trapping of sable for three years to restore the species’ population.

  Surprisingly, no one showed much interest in the more available resource—salmon—until 1896, when the first fish processing plant, sponsored by the Japanese, was established at the mouth of the Kamchatka River, once the site of the peninsula’s most prolific run. By the time the last Japanese left the peninsula thirty-one years later, Kamchatka had been thoroughly incorporated into the Soviet system, and both the salmon fishery and the sable trade were transformed into state monopolies. Kamchatkans were free to harvest as much salmon as they wanted until 1930, when the state’s imposition of limits radically affected subsistence fishing, and by 1960 the official allowance, 132 pounds a year, was barely sufficient to keep a sled dog from starving. Meanwhile the commercial fishery was booming, and by 1990 Kamchatka’s total annual salmon catch had increased from 30,000 tons to 1.5 million tons. As in Alaska, the fishery began to develop dry holes—a river here, a bay there, under severe pressure.

  As Kamchatka receded behind the curtain of official xenophobia after World War II, Moscow rapidly developed the area’s defenses—a submarine base in Avachinsky Bay; intercontinental ballistic missile launch sites, satellite tracking stations, military outposts up and down its coastlines—and expected in return “gross output.” Not just salmon and sable; now everything was up for grabs. By the late ’80s, central Kamchatka’s primary forests, 60 percent old-growth larch, were decimated; the Soviets had managed to annihilate Kamchatka’s herring spawning grounds as well. Today, in a debauchery of joint ventures with foreign companies, Moscow has taken aim at the crab and pollack fisheries, at risk to suffer the same fate as the larch, the sable, the herring. Nor has the end of communism spelled anything but crisis for Kamchatka’s legendary brown bears. By 1997, the peninsula’s Cold War population of grizzlies, an estimated twenty thousand bears, had been halved by poachers and trophy hunters. At the rate things are going, says Boris Kopylov, the vice-director of Kamchatka’s State Environmental Protection Committee, the most powerful federal agency mandated to preserve the peninsula’s natural resources, “In the next five years all the endangered species will be at a critical level, the sea otters and bears especially.” This year, the agency’s staff was halved: Conservation law enforcement in remote areas vanished as helicopter patrols were reduced from three hundred flying hours to zero, and the system, as Kopylov lamented, didn’t work anymore. “If you want to save Kamchatka,” said Robert Moiseev, one of the peninsula’s leading environmental scientists, “you’re welcome to pay for it.”

  Shortly after dawn, the criminals returned to collect us, a humorless sense of urgency in their manner. The chiefs were mightily vexed, they told us, having last night discovered that thieves had spirited away twelve hundred kilos—more than one ton—of caviar the gang had cached on the beach.

  “Check Rinat’s knapsack,” I said. The criminals smiled uneasily—heh-heh—and we loaded our gear into the skiff. I’d come to Kamchatka, twice, to fish, and so far I’d been allowed to do damn little of it. In July, a rafting trip on the Kamchatka River quickly devolved into some awful hybrid of absurdity—Samuel Beckett meets Jack London. The rafts were dry-rotted, the river had been dead for ten years, the mosquitoes were nightmarish, our fishing “guide” was actually a hawk-eyed tayozhnik, a taiga woodsman, who had given his stern heart to hunting and horses but had probably never
seen a sportfisherman in his life.

  On my second expedition to Kamchatka, the day I arrived in P-K from Anchorage an Mi-2 helicopter crashed, killing everyone aboard, and I no longer had a ride to the mythical river up north. My local outfitter hadn’t considered a Plan B. The only alternative, untested, that the outfitter could offer was for Rinat and me to head out to the coast and try to beg a lift across the tundra with anybody we could find in possession of a GTT—the acronym translated as “Tracks Vehicle: Heavy.”

  First we drove in Rinat’s truck to a village south of P-K to collect Sergei, the wilderness guide, a Russian version of Bubba, attired in camouflage fatigues, who was an erstwhile law-enforcement officer for RIVOD, the peninsula’s fish regulatory board. He was now employed as a fieldworker by TINRO—the Pacific Scientific Research Institute of Fisheries and Oceanography, a state agency operating in association with the Russian Academy of Sciences but in cahoots with commercial interests. From 1990 to 1996, hard currency gushed in as TINRO became a clearinghouse for the avaricious flow of foreign investment into Kamchatka’s fisheries. “Everybody in the institute got very rich. There was so much money they didn’t know what to do with it,” a TINRO scientist had told me. “The bosses built big dachas, bought expensive cars.” The institute’s sudden wealth finally attracted the attention of Moscow, which began sucking up 90 percent of the institute’s revenues and controlling quotas.

  Sergei, as a quasi-scientific government employee, was our insurance, along for the ride not only to steer us clear of official trouble but to legitimize whatever it was we might end up doing that was a bit too diki—wild, independent—for the apparatchiks.

  At the last town before the windswept barrenness of the coast, we turned down a dirt road toward a pre-Soviet Dogpatch, a cluster of clapboard and tar-papered houses, stopping in front of the first one we saw with a GTT in its yard. There on the wooden stoop was Misha, barefoot, wearing camouflage bib overalls, one of his forearms intricately tattooed. He could have been any midwestern hayseed waiting for the glory of team sport. Sergei hopped out, explained our mission, and offered to hire Misha and his machine.