Travels in Siberia

by Frazier

  Across the street and a few blocks up from the motel, a neon Kirin Beer sign glowed fuzzily and vividly. The sign indicated the Szechwan restaurant where I ate most evenings. The place had good hot-and-sour soup, spicy double-sautéed pork, and a large television set that remained on all the time. I went in, sat, ordered. As I ate, I thought about Pushkin and watched network TV stars compete in group sporting events. One of the groups competing was Team Baywatch. Though I was, to outward appearances, still depressed, I had in some sense never been happier.

  On the sidewalk on my way back, I passed several Native kids standing around by their bicycles and talking. A Native girl with frosted tips on her ginger-colored hair said to a slim boy, “I heard you were in an accident and had to be medevacked out.”

  “Yeah,” the boy replied modestly. After a pause he added, “It was pretty cool.”

  Another means of passing the time while socked in in Nome was to visit the office of the Chamber of Commerce on Front Street and read the local news stories it had collected in a file labeled RUSSIAN EVENTS. Many of these stories had to do with the adventurous or crazy people who travel through Nome en route (successfully or not) to or from the Russian side. Not many of the items predated 1987, the year the cold-water swimmer Lynne Cox swam the Bering Strait between the Diomede Islands and became the first American to legally visit Big Diomede since J. Edgar Hoover sealed the border in 1948. Her two-and-a-half-hour swim in 44° water left Lynne Cox more dead than alive when she reached Big Diomede. The feat attracted notice worldwide. At Gorbachev’s historic meeting with Reagan in 1987, the Russian premier said that Lynne Cox’s courage had shown Russians and Americans how close to each other they lived.

  Item: Also around then, the ice in the strait froze thick enough that a Mexican illegal alien named Lazaro Castro, all on his own, was able to walk across. When he arrived in Big Diomede, the Russians arrested him, confined him, and afterward escorted him back to the United States, saying, “Next time . . . use the front door.”

  Item: In 1989, a joint U.S.-Soviet expedition traveled by dogsled and skis from Anadyr, on the Siberian coast, twelve hundred miles northeastward across the strait to the Alaskan North Slope and Kotzebue. The international trekking team then came to Nome. During a celebration marking the journey, two Soviet journalists, Anatoly Tkachenko and Alexander Genkin, defected to the United States at Little Diomede.

  Item: In 1992, a doctor from Austin, Texas, looked into whether he could drive across the strait in his four-wheel-drive vehicle. And in 1996, Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, an Englishman, listed in the 1984 Guinness Book of World Records as the “World’s Greatest Living Explorer,” announced that he would cross the strait on foot. (No follow-up, however, on how the plans of these two aspirants turned out.)

  Item: In 1996, Dmitri Shparo, of Moscow, Soviet explorer and folk hero, winner of the Lenin Medal, became stranded with his two sons on an ice floe off the coast of Chukotka while attempting to cross the strait from Russia to America on skis. After extensive searches, a Coast Guard C-130 aircraft located the party, and a Russian helicopter rescued them from the floe. The next year Shparo and one son tried again, encountered better ice conditions, and crossed successfully to Alaska.

  (During one of my later stays in Nome, I happened to be there at the same time as two young Englishmen who had built an amphibious vehicle in which they planned to go around the world. Because they imagined that the Bering Strait crossing would be a tricky leg of the venture, the Englishmen were trying out their vehicle first here. It was a kind of pickup truck on pontoons, with screws that looked like giant crayons on either side to power it through the water, and a paddle wheel arrangement on the front to help it, they said, “walk” from the water up onto any floating ice they encountered. They took the vehicle to Wales, drove off into the strait, failed to make sufficient headway, and soon became tightly frozen in ice fifty yards from shore. Eskimos from Wales cut them free with chain saws and hauled them back to land. When I saw the Englishmen on the streets of Nome in their bright red coats and black trousers, and they smiled by lifting their upper lips to expose their top teeth, I understood that Monty Python’s Flying Circus had been simply a documentary.)

  Most of the clippings in the “Russian Events” file were about the reopening of the border during the late Gorbachev and early Yeltsin years, and expressed the hopefulness of that time. In Wales, a sculptor named David Barr erected a big hand reaching toward the strait and Russia; he said he hoped to build an identical hand reaching toward America in the Russian coastal village of Uelen. In 1988, Alaska Airlines initiated its Russian Far East flights. That same year, a delegation of Alaskans journeyed to Provideniya on a “Friendship Flight,” met Russian dignitaries, and discussed plans for Russian-American business cooperation. Delegations of Russians made return visits that year and in later ones. Bering Air, a small Nome airline, began flying to Chukotka in 1989. Trans-strait telephone connections, which previously had to go around the world to end up across the strait two hundred miles away, now were sent by a more direct route, via a switching station in Fairbanks and then a satellite.

  Soviet Young Pioneers from Provideniya paid a visit to the Boy Scouts of Nome. A burn victim in Chukotka needing special medical care was flown to an Alaska hospital. People in Russia and Alaska began to discuss creating an intercontinental nature reserve to be called the Bering Strait Land Bridge Park. Basketball teams and dance groups from Chukotka came to Nome. Concerned citizens of Nome, learning of the hunger in parts of the Russian Far East, devised various projects for sending relief to their Russian neighbors. As the news stories moved closer in time to the present, however, the hope and anticipation evident in the events of the late 1980s seemed to have disappeared. The file contained no item later than 1995, presumably when the problems Vic Goldsberry had complained to me about became too great to ignore.

  A story from The Washington Post of July 1, 1990, caught my attention. It mentioned the “palpable sense of giddiness” in the air in Nome since the border had been opened and quoted a lot from a Nome real-estate broker named Jim Stimpfle. He had all kinds of ideas. He described wonderful cruises from Nome to Chukotka that might be possible—a New Year’s package, for example, in which celebrants would sail to Provideniya before the holiday, enjoy a New Year’s Eve party in Russia, and then (thanks to the time change at the International Date Line, which here coincides with the Russian-American border) return to Nome for the repeat of New Year’s Eve on the following day. Because of the ice conditions at that time of year, a Soviet icebreaker would be required, but that was a mere detail to Mr. Stimpfle. “Imagine,” he told the Post, “you’re soaking in a hot tub on the deck, sipping Stolichnaya and listening to the strains of Rimsky-Korsakoff. The Northern Lights are out. Polar bears are frolicking on the ice. And you are smashing your way to the Evil Empire. It’s the last great trek on earth.”

  Somehow I got a feeling that in Mr. Stimpfle I had found a fellow sufferer of the dread Russia-love. I thought I should talk to this man. The lady in the Chamber of Commerce said that I might run into him in town anywhere and that he often had breakfast at Fat Freddy’s, next door to my motel. On that first visit to Nome, I didn’t see him, but on a later one, while eating reindeer sausage and eggs in Fat Freddy’s, I heard a voice rise above the breakfast clatter, just as buoyant and visionary as it had sounded in the newspaper story.

  I introduced myself, asked a few questions, and then hung out with Jim Stimpfle for a couple of days. Mostly we talked and drove around. I also helped him move some furniture. We went by his house and I met his wife, Bernadette, an Inupiat from King Island, and their three children. I accompanied him to the Nome City Jail—“voted the best jail in the United States by Playboy magazine,” Stimpfle proudly informed me—so he could collect monthly rent from the warden, a house tenant of his. Stimpfle proved to be a rush-hour stampede of ideas for the betterment of Nome and the improvement of relations across the strait. He looks a lot like the Ge
rman film director Erich von Stroheim. He has a thick neck, a mostly bald head, and pale blue eyes that dart around in his glasses’ steel frames. He said, “I was named Alaskan of the Year by the Alaskan Chamber of Commerce in 1989! But I’ve set my sights even higher! I may be just a small-town Realtor, but I intend to win the Nobel Peace Prize someday!” Stimpfle’s laugh is a cackle of pure joy.

  Born in Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City; father a dentist; raised in Washington, D.C., area; graduated from George Mason University with a degree in history, 1970; went through countercultural divagations standard for the time; married; moved to Fairbanks; lived in a tent-camper; had triplets (all boys); divorced; ex-wife went to work on the Alaskan oil pipeline; Stimpfle stayed in Fairbanks; raised sons; worked as janitor, forest-fire-fighter; trained as a drug and alcohol counselor (much success at that; was told, “Jim, if you can talk a person out of drinking, you certainly can talk him into buying a house”; agreed with this sentiment); met future wife, Bernadette, on a lunch line at the University of Alaska when both were presenting educational programs; married Bernadette; got real estate license; moved to Nome and bought house in 1981.

  Stimpfle had always wanted to be a diplomat; many of his father’s patients were diplomats in Washington. Thus, Stimpfle took great interest in the first stirrings of Russian-American amity that began shortly after he moved to Nome. When Lynne Cox swam the strait, Stimpfle managed to be among the party accompanying her to Big Diomede, and there, with the help of Alaskan Natives in the group, he made a lot of contacts among Russian natives, and those led to communications with Soviet mayors and other officials. Stimpfle wrote letters to people across the strait and to officials in D.C. and received some replies. A man he knew in the U.S. State Department said Stimpfle was having more luck getting through to the Russians than official U.S. channels had achieved. The “Friendship Flight” to Provideniya was largely Stimpfle’s doing. In 1988, he made a rousing speech before top management at Alaska Airlines on the subject of why they should begin flying to the Russian Far East. The airline decided he was right. (So, in a sense, it had been because of him that I had happened to move to Missoula.)

  Among Stimpfle’s many visions for the future, three stood out. Having seen the failure of the Nome merchants’ policy of accepting rubles (he had accumulated, he said, fifty or sixty thousand worthless rubles himself), he thought travelers on both sides of the strait should use something called “smart cards,” a kind of credit card able to exchange goods and services internationally, value for value, without any money changing hands. He explained this idea to me at length, but I never got my mind around how it would actually work. Eventually he admitted that his friends and family had grown so sick of hearing about smart cards that they begged him not to bring up the subject anymore.

  Second, he touted the great regional benefits that would accrue from establishing an Alaskan-Chukotkan coastal and trans-strait ferry service. He said one of the small ships used for supply and transport to offshore oil-drilling platforms would be perfect for this ferry line. The ferry would go from community to community, carrying local passengers, bulk goods, and eco- or adventure travelers. The route would follow the Alaskan coast northward, cross to the Chukchi Peninsula, continue down the Russian coast, recross the strait, and begin the circuit again. He said he had talked to the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich about the ferry idea, and Abramovich had asked him, “But Jim, will it make any money?”

  The idea that gets Stimpfle the most het up concerns a proposed tunnel under the Bering Strait. One of the business cards he hands out identifies him as a director of the Interhemispheric Bering Strait Tunnel and Railroad Group. This trans-strait tunnel would be seventy-two miles long—only forty-one miles longer, Stimpfle points out, than the Chunnel between England and France. It would begin in the low mountain behind the village of Wales, seven miles back from the water, to achieve the proper slope, and would come out in Cape Dezhnev on the other side. Earthquakes would not be a problem for the tunnel, he said, because this is a seismically stable area, north of the Pacific Rim’s high-quake Ring of Fire. And the Bering Strait tunnel, unlike the Chunnel, would need no lining, because it would go through granite all the way. Of course, extensive rail links would be required. Many billions of dollars would have to be spent, but that is not unthinkable when you consider the money governments throw around these days.

  Stimpfle had driven us to the Nome dump to do one errand or another, and we had chatted for a while with dump manager Gary Hart. Then Stimpfle turned onto a high winding road in the hills above Nome, still talking about the tunnel. We stopped and got out on the tundra to better view the geography. “Asia’s just over there!” he said, gesturing across the foggy strait. “Asia! The biggest continent, containing the largest population, in the entire world! If you had a Bering Strait tunnel, and railroad tracks to it and from it, think of the coal, the minerals, the grain you could move! Right now if you ship wheat from Kansas City to Bombay, it’s going about twice the distance that it would be to send it through this tunnel. With this tunnel, a passenger, if he wanted, could travel on trains the entire way across North America and across Siberia from New York City clear to London around four-fifths of the world!”

  Stimpfle raised both his arms in the air, enclosing the bleak surrounding Arctic sky, and his eyes increased their wattage. “This could be HUGE!” he cried.

  Chapter 6

  Everybody told me I should go to Chukotka with a group. That seemed sensible; not even George Kennan had traveled alone. The people at Bering Air recommended that I talk to a woman who runs a tour company in Anchorage. I called her, and after some months she found four other people who wanted to go. Arrangements were made, and she got me a visa. I paid my $3,000, bought the gear I would need, and went back to Nome. One afternoon in early August 1999 I was in a twin engine Beechcraft taxiing out the Nome Airport runway bound for the Russian city of Provideniya, 233 miles away.

  Of the plane’s twelve passenger seats, a few had been removed to provide extra room for eighteen fifty-pound bags of salt that the United States was giving to Chukotka. Late summer is the time for netting and salting down the winter’s supply of salmon for residents of the Chukchi Peninsula, and salt is always needed. So far that summer, Bering Air pilots had ferried seven thousand pounds of it to Provideniya. In other passenger seats were: Karen, fifty-six, a high school counselor; Bill, forty-eight, her husband, a telephone lineman; Briggie, a former high school English and journalism teacher, in her early sixties; and Micky, Briggie’s husband and Karen’s brother, also in his sixties. When I asked Micky what he did, he said, “I’m semiretired. I manage my family’s holdings.” All were from California and enjoyed photography. They hoped to take pictures in Chukotka, and for that they had brought a lot of gear.

  They had arrived at the Bering Air hangar in a deteriorating mood. Micky asked me if I had any apprehensions about this trip, and I said, “Well, let’s just say I’ve never done this before.” He said he was afraid of boats, his sister was afraid of bears, and his wife hated to fly in small planes. She sat gripping the armrests as we took off. The pilot, Larry, treated this journey as if it were a mail route he’d flown a thousand times. I peered out, wishing I could see Asia—the Chukchi Nos (nos means “nose”), the very tip of the continent—but the weather, though calm enough to fly in, was still densely overcast, so that even the ends of the plane’s wings were obscured. No bells or sirens went off as we crossed into Russian airspace. I felt I was in an X-ray machine: a big change had taken place, but silently and invisibly.

  I had a moment of exhilaration thinking how much my father, a dedicated wanderer and traveler, would have liked to do what I was doing now. He had made a point of taking the family on car-camping vacations as far as one could drive in North America—to where roads ran out in Alaska and to the end of the Overseas Highway in Key West, Florida. At proud occasions he used to point to my brothers and sisters and me and brag, “These kids have been to both
ends of the road!” For me, getting beyond the end of the road had required some momentum, not to mention a major shift in history.

  Larry was talking to the control tower in Provideniya. Someone there spoke English serviceably. I remembered the sculptor David Barr, who had wanted to build hands reaching toward each other on both shores. Still, I could understand why Micky was uneasy in the seat beside me. All those stories about corruption, bribes, mafia guys, beatings. Who knew what would be there? The tour company had sent a group to Chukotka for a short trip earlier in the year, and they’d had no problems. But in The Gulag Archipelago, I had read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s musings on the proper memorial for the forced labor camps of Stalin’s time: “I visualize . . .,” Solzhenitsyn wrote, “somewhere on a high point in the Kolyma, a most enormous Stalin, just such a size as he himself dreamed of, with mustaches many feet long and the bared fangs of a camp commandant, one hand holding the reins and the other wielding a knout with which to beat his team of hundreds of people harnessed in fives and all pulling hard. This would also be a fine sight on the edge of the Chukchi Peninsula next to the Bering Strait.”

  We descended from the clouds and suddenly Chukotka appeared. We were flying at about four thousand feet and parallel to the shore. The scene had the basic color scheme of arrival—blue water, white surf, green hills. Just as at the landing at Omsk, someone said, dramatically, “Siberia!” This time it was Bill, the telephone lineman, providing narration for the video he was shooting through the plane window. On the barren shore I saw no crazed statue such as Solzhenitsyn had proposed, or indeed any sign of habitation at all.

  Our approach took us along Provideniya Bay and over to the town of Ureliki, across the bay from the city of Provideniya. Ureliki used to be a major military base and is now a much smaller one, and commercial flights use its runways. The moment we landed, everything was different. The scene where we had taken off, just an hour before, bore virtually no similarity to the one where we came down. As we neared the ground, we flew just above fences with black fence posts shaped like upside-down L’s and trailing broken strands of black barbed wire with big black barbs, like something from a World War II movie, maybe Stalag 17. And in America, when a plane crashes in or near an airport, management whisks the wreckage away, so as not to dishearten future travelers. Here, plane wrecks had merely been moved over to one side of the runway. We taxied by a couple of crumpled-up passenger aircraft and one crushed helicopter.