by Frazier
I told them they were right about the tents, and right in general—but what did they expect? This was Russia. Misrepresenting my own experience somewhat, I said that judging by the many Russian trips I’d been on, ours was about average so far. My answer calmed them only a little. It seemed that what really rankled was the money. Nobody likes to be ripped off. Exactly what had our $3,000 apiece paid for? The plane ride had been a puddle jump. We had stayed in private homes in Provideniya. The food couldn’t have been that expensive, or the gas for the army vehicle or the boat ride. Where, they asked, had the money gone?
“That’s simple,” I said. “I’m sure most of the money was spent on bribes.”
The Californians looked at one another. Bribes. These were honest and decent American folks. Such a thought had not crossed their minds. I then explained about the many important people who probably had to be paid off for our easy entry into the country, maybe even for our unexpected journey to the camp here. I told them about the widespread reputation of Russian officialdom and the way business here is said to be done. I could see them feeling a little better with every moment that passed. After this conversation, and for the rest of the trip, I can’t say that they were exactly content, but the subject of where the money had gone did not trouble them anymore.
I was reminded of the old joke of W. C. Fields, famous comedian and drinker from the 1930s. Fields walks into a bar, and he says to the bartender, “Did I spend a twenty-dollar bill in here last night?” The bartender says, “Yes, sir, you did.” “Oh, what a relief,” Fields replies. “I thought I’d lost it.”
During times when nothing else was planned, I walked the surrounding landscape for hours. I am susceptible to geography, and the idea that I was in a different country, continent, and hemisphere—with the United States forty-five minutes away!—stayed in the front of my mind. I felt I’d fallen down the rabbit hole, or stepped behind a secret sliding panel in ordinary life. Not that the scenery here on the other side offered much in the way of drama. Instead the fog, sea, beach, and tundra suggested drama of an undramatic kind, like the dull, flat paint jobs used to obscure the most expensive warplanes. I went high on the tundra hills, stepping from hummock to hummock in the rubber boots Vladimir-the-guide had provided me, and found thousands more mushrooms. This time I checked for water damage and tried to pick the newest-looking boletes, ones that maybe had popped up just that morning. Ivan Tanko, when I showed them to him, pronounced them otlychnie grybii—outstanding mushrooms—and Cenia, the young wife, strung them on thread and hung them from the beams of the cabin ceiling to dry.
I thought it somehow wrong that geography this momentous could begin without any sign or monument to commemorate the fact of it. Solzhenitsyn’s statue on the shoreline had been just a fantasy, and the reaching-hand sculpture in Uelen merely a plan. But couldn’t there be even a simple boundary marker of some kind? “Welcome to Asia,” or something? I had read that during the reign of Catherine the Great, iron markers bearing the Russian Imperial double-headed eagle were placed all along the coast of Chukchi-land. As I walked, I kept my eyes open. Who knew? Maybe a few of those double-eagle signposts were still out there.
One day after a few miles of wandering I saw a pole or post on a seaside bluff in the distance and went to check it out. To my surprise it was indeed a monument. What I had taken for a pole was actually an iron whaling harpoon, the kind that’s shot from a gun. It had a blunt-tipped, finned head, ugly as the point of a missile. A pedestal of rocks and cement supported the harpoon at the base, and an arrangement of whale ribs on the ground a pace or so away bracketed it. A plaque in Russian on the monument read, IN MEMORY OF THE WHALING FLOTILLA “ALEUT,” 1932–1967. ERECTED BY THE CREW OF THE “CELESTIAL,” SEPT. 1970. A smaller plaque said, HISTORY OF THE SOVIET WHALING INDUSTRY IN THE FAR EAST. 23 OCTOBER 1932 THE FIRST WHALE WAS TAKEN IN THE PACIFIC OCEAN. A list of flotilla names followed. Waves broke against the stones at the bottom of the bluff and continued to the horizon in foggy obscurity. In the surrounding vastness of sea and hills I could not pick out a single other work of man. Never had I seen a monument in a lonelier spot.
Aside from the rain and wind and chill, and the chronically damp clothes, I enjoyed the fish camp. After salmon started coming to the nets, the food improved. Valentina made sautéed salmon steaks, and a soup of salmon heads and potatoes called ukha, and fried salmon liver and salmon milt with kasha, and salmon eggs and butter on thinly sliced black bread. For Valentina’s birthday, Gennady shot a spotted seal. Some of us went along in the boats to observe as he approached a small isthmus beside a bay, slipped ashore, concealed himself behind one of the special stone cairns built there for seal hunting, laid his rifle in a crenellation at the top of the cairn, waited for a curious seal to pop its head up from the waves, and shot the seal in that split second right in the head at a distance of more than a hundred yards. And all this with iron sights and not a scope! The dead seal drifted and its blood made a red plume in the blue water. Vladimir-the-guide zipped over in his boat and picked it up. When we returned to the camp, Ivan quickly and expertly butchered it—its cute seal face looked strange cut up and reduced to a cubist jumble—and Valentina fried its liver and boiled its meat with angel-hair pasta for the birthday dinner. Seal meat tastes like the beef of a cow fed on salmon.
Morning, noon, and evening I helped Ivan tend the nets. When the nets’ floats went under, the net was full and had to be retrieved soon or little crabs would eat the catch and reduce them to limp, emptied-out skin wrappings. We pulled the nets up on the beach, untangled the salmon, and threw them into a heap by Ivan’s salt barrels and cleaning board. Most of the salmon were of two kinds, king and humpbacked; there was also a shimmery, spotted char known in North America as the Dolly Varden. The nets also caught many strange, spiky little fish that Ivan called bychki. Later I learned that these fish are a favorite Russian snack to have with vodka. They come in a can, with a distinctive tomato sauce. Ivan disdained them, so we threw them away.
Ivan was fun to fish with. He and I talked a lot. Whole five-minute periods went by during which I understood nothing he said, but that was okay. He also sang folk songs and rousing Communist Party anthems he had learned during his student days in Leningrad. Taking a deep breath and throwing his head back, he belted out, “Lenin, yeshcho zhivoi . . .” (Lenin, living still . . .). Sometimes when pulling the net he recited lines from great works of literature, matching the recitation to the action. A favorite went, “Tyanem, po-tyanem / Vytyanut’ ne mozhem . . .” (We pull, and we pull / We cannot pull it out . . .). He said this was from a fable called “Repka,” about people trying to pull up a huge turnip. He said it was written by Pushkin.
Some of the other lines he spoke or half sang he also said were by Pushkin, but I didn’t catch them or write them down. (“Repka,” it turns out, is an old fable, not Pushkin’s.) Maybe I had put Pushkin in Ivan’s mind because of the joke about throwing rocks. Still, I thought again of the poem Pushkin wrote based on Horace’s poetic claim, “I have built a monument more lasting than bronze.” The Russian poet’s prediction of his own literary immortality was in an unpublished work found among his papers after his death. That poem said he would live forever in his verses on the lips of living men, and his name would be remembered “wherever one poet is still alive.” Across Russia, he foretold, all would know him, including
I Fin, i nyne díki Tungús,
I drug steppéi Kalmík . . .
(The Fin, and the now wild Tungus,
and the Kalmik, friend of the steppes . . .)
What a grand prediction for a young poet in a still-young literature to venture! And I can affirm that as regards the Chukchi, the spirit of it came true.
The Arctic summer twilight lasted in the evening until about eleven thirty and returned in the morning about four. Sometimes, during the latest or earliest hours of light, we heard the sound of Vladimir-the-Yupik’s outboard motor growing louder or fading away. All six of the Yupiks missing
since the storm remained unaccounted for; he kept going out to try to find them, the other Russians said. One morning just after dawn, he and his son came upon one of the Yupik boats washed up on a shore. No tracks on the beach or tundra indicated that any men had been nearby, so doubtless this boat had been among those abandoned in the storm when its owners jumped from it to another. Vladimir-the-Yupik towed it back to the fish camp and beached it on the gravel beside the cabin.
When I heard about it, I went to take a look. In its sea-battered state, the boat most resembled objects I had seen that were damaged by a bear. Its seat struts were broken, its seats crushed down, its oarlocks torn out, and its sides dented in. Pieces of Styrofoam-type stuff that had fit under the seats for added flotation had been knocked askew and shattered. Spills of gravel strewed the boat’s bottom, along with sea plants, and pieces of wire, and a few chunks of dried salmon that were white and waterlogged. Natural disasters produce a special grunginess unlike that of human-made chaos, somehow. Observing all this I got a sense that the terror the boat’s occupants had felt was still there.
On an afternoon jaunt with Gennady and Ivan and Vladimir-the-guide, I met more Yupiks who were searching for the missing men. The four of us had stopped at a calm, lee-side beach to have tea when two boats bigger than ours carrying six or seven native guys passed by. Seeing us they abruptly veered and came ashore. The sight of non-Yupik Russians whom they assumed to be on the same mission as their own cheered them, and they jumped from their boats and thanked us and shook our hands. Then they heard me say something in English to Vladimir-the-guide, and all did a triple take. Learning that we were in fact on an excursion of tourism, and not a search party, they cooled in their enthusiasm. But having pulled their boats up, they decided to take a tea break also. Gennady and Ivan joined them while Vladimir and I hiked along the strand to an ancient site nearby.
The site, as Vladimir explained to me, offered proof of the efficacy of the toggling harpoon point. Sea mammal hunters started living at an encampment here about five hundred years ago, several centuries after the toggling point’s invention. On the long, grassy expanse above the seaside gravel, many large skulls of bowhead whales they had killed stood in an unevenly spaced line. Looking along the row from one end of it to the other, I absorbed the wordless impact of the site. In life these creatures would have been forty feet long and weighed fifty tons. The men who lived here pursued them aboard walrus-skin boats in water that was death even to fall into, and killed them with harpoons tipped with ingenious pieces of ivory. Vladimir said no one knew for sure if the skulls had had a ceremonial purpose, or perhaps simply served as stands on which to dry the skin boats and hold them ready for quick launching when whales were seen.
A distance away in the knee-high grasses, two whale jawbones of great length had been set upright; they curved toward each other like parentheses, making an almost-completed white arc against the hillside backdrop of green. To me, the minimalist eloquence of native sites tops the fanciest cathedral any day. Vladimir told me there was also a cemetery hundreds of years old on the crest of the hill above. While he took photographs of the skulls, I hiked to it—no easy deal, given the steepness and the thick growth of angelica plants. Here and there a large bear had preceded me, pressing down the plants and leaving tufts of ginger-colored fur. When I reached the cemetery, an unfenced saddle of bare ground inlaid with rectangular stone graves, I saw that the drop from it on one side was as precipitous as the first hill on a roller coaster. For a moment the clouds and fog over the ocean opened out and afforded a view that was, approximately, eternal. With just bare land, sky, and empty sea up ahead of me, I had for the first time an astronomical awareness that I was standing on a planet—perhaps the way a visitor would feel walking on Mars.
And then, when we returned to the fish camp, amazing news. The missing Yupiks had been found! Vladimir-the-Yupik had heard it over the radio on an Alaskan station within range of the cabin’s long antenna. At six thirty on Saturday morning, the U.S. Coast Guard had received a fax from Moscow authorizing the Americans to search Russian waters. The Coast Guard immediately sent a C-130 plane equipped with radar, and it picked up blips from the aluminum hulls of two of the boats about thirty miles west of Provideniya that same afternoon. A few hours after this find, a Russian freighter spotted the other boat. All the men were swollen from exposure and caked with salt from four days at sea but had suffered no serious harm and in fact refused to leave their boats when Coast Guard helicopters appeared overhead. The men had all managed not to throw the valuables overboard and did not want to abandon the boats now. After some delay, Russian vessels arrived to tow the boats to port.
Good feelings from this turn of events made the rest of our trip go better. Afterward, every native person we met, and some Russian-Russians, smiled when they realized we were from America. The Californians had been agitating to visit a native village so they could photograph “the people and the faces,” as Karen explained. I told her there were people and faces right here at the fish camp, but she was thinking in terms of volume. To satisfy their requests, one afternoon Vladimir-the-guide organized a full-scale expedition of the entire party, along with some Russians and their boats from another fish camp along the shore. At armada strength, we set out to pay calls on Vladimir-the-Yupik’s village of Novo Chaplino and another village called Yndrekanute.
Along the way we stopped at the site with the whale skulls. For a change the sky had cleared to a bright blue, and in the sunshine the arrangements of ancient bleached bones looked even more impressive than before. Perhaps selfishly, I still preferred my previous viewing of it, when the day had been gloomy and no one but Vladimir and me there. While the others walked around and took pictures, Gennady and I hung out by the beach and he showed me the wonders of his GPS device. When he first turned it on he said, “We must wait for a sputnik.” We waited, a satellite linkup occurred, and the GPS began to tell us where we were in relation to everything. I think we both got a kick out of doing this high-tech business next to the ancient skulls. Provideniya was 55 km (35 miles) by air to the southwest, Anadyr 596 km (370 miles) in the same general direction; I forget how far other landmarks in Chukotka were. Significantly, he had programmed the GPS only for places in Russia and had omitted all American destinations, maybe so as not to upset Russian authorities. Our own coordinates at that moment were 64° 38' 42" N latitude and 172° 31' 09" W longitude. Vitus Bering, in his inconclusive voyage northward between the continents, had turned back at 67° 18', about 160 nautical miles north of where we were now.
From the whale skull place—Vladimir-the-guide and other Russians called it Whalebone Alley—we motored on across calm water and through a small archipelago of islands that were mostly high black cliffs with green moss on their horizontal parts and white birds dispersing from them like pollen. Vladimir-the-guide pointed out the kittiwakes, jaegers, eider ducks, cormorants, and common merles flying by. Some little islands seemed to be all puffins. These squat, large-billed birds have wings that are set midway along their bodies and apparently perpendicular to them like the wings of bees. The puffin swarms almost seemed to buzz as they burst from the cliffs and went arrowing by. Then suddenly, among our group of boats, a gray whale surfaced, turned one flipper up, and dove back down. Instantly we all shouted, in at least two languages, “Whale!” The word “Whale!” like “Shark!” or “Fire!” is a word you don’t say, it says you.
Motors idling, we sat and waited for the whale to reappear. From whale-watching trips I’d been on, I knew that it is possible to time a whale and predict the duration of a dive, so I asked a Russian guy in my boat how long the whale would stay under. “Until he comes up again,” he replied. The wind had died completely, and lozenge-shaped spaces were swapping back and forth on the surface in the flat calm. The sea flashed colors of azure and green and turquoise with a swimming-pool allure, if you could forget how cold it was. Here and there curled white feathers dropped from the passing seabirds sat undisturbed like w
ood shavings on a shiny floor. Five minutes or more went by. Then a mile away a whale spout rose against the dark land beyond it. The spout shot white and unmistakable in the sky, then dropped back, leaving a veil of mist that hung in the air and drifted to one side.
At the first village we visited, Novo Chaplino, not a lot of people were home. Some had still not returned from the St. Lawrence Island trip and were stopping with relatives in Provideniya or elsewhere. Others had gone to tend the reindeer herds or catch salmon or hunt. A few of us drank tea with the principal of the local school, and then we all got back in the boats and continued to Yndrekanute, where more was going on. As our fleet came up the narrow bight leading to the Yndrekanute boat landing, a bunch of kids and young people ran along the shore beside us shouting and waving like in a scene from the travels of an old-time explorer. Some of the kids threw stones or shot at us with slingshots. After we disembarked, the Russians in our party spoke sharply to these boys, who hung their heads and smiled.
Yndrekanute had been created or expanded by the consolidation of a lot of small village groups into a single collective during Communist times. The recent disappearance of communism had left complicated ruins and a sense of “Now what?” The crater at the center of the post-Soviet wreckage was the late office of the Communist Party; this brick building had char marks around its broken-out windows, blackened wood and cinders inside, and spray-painted graffiti inside and out. The central-heating system for the village had quit long ago and its aboveground steam pipes were shedding pieces of insulation effusively. The village had formerly supported a reindeer-raising collective and a fox-fur-growing farm. Now the empty fox cages spread along a flat expanse below the town in disarray, all scattered and tumbledown. A whitened heap of bones of the whales and other sea mammals Yndrekanute’s hunters had killed to feed the foxes resembled a junk pile of wrecked cars, and beyond the cages and boxes, discarded fifty-three-gallon metal drums were strewn into the distance in multitudes.