by Frazier
The next day we continued winding generally eastward through the Sikhote-Alins. I noted villages called Uborka (Harvest), Shumnyi (Noisy), and Rudnyi (Oreville). Now we were in Arsenyev’s very footsteps. A little beyond Rudnyi we crossed a mountain pass that hardly looked like one. This was the divide between the waters that flow roundabout to the Pacific via the Ussuri and the Amur, and those that drain down the front of the Sikhote-Alins into the Pacific directly. At the crest of the divide, back among the roadside weeds, stood a cement obelisk on which was inscribed (in Russian) CROSSED OVER THIS PASS: M. I. VENYUKOV 1858; N. M. PRZHEVALSKII 1887; V. K. ARSENYEV 1906.
Sergei did not know who the first guy, M. I. Venyukov, was. Later I learned that he was a major general who traveled all over Asia and Japan and harbored revolutionary opinions, secretly reporting for Alexander Herzen’s magazine, Kolokol (The Bell), and finally emigrating for good in 1877. N. M. Przhevalskii, Sergei said, was an Asiatic traveler best known for his explorations of deserts and steppes, and for discovering a kind of steppe horse that is named after him. Przhevalskii bore a strong resemblance to Joseph Stalin, and was even rumored to have fathered the future dictator while traveling in Georgia. The rumor is ridiculous, however, Sergei said.
V. K. Arsenyev’s passage across this divide happened during the mapping expedition guided by Dersu and is described in detail in the book. Arsenyev continued from here until he came to the Pacific and the port village of Olga, where he was resupplied. Sergei said we would also aim for Olga and camp near there.
Often the taiga stood so close to the road that the vines almost touched the side of the car, and on the upgrades we were looking into the canopy. At one point in the movie Dersu Uzala, a tiger stalks Arsenyev’s party, and the Siberian tiger used for the scene was a splendid animal, all liquid motion and snarling growls. Though near extinction, the Siberian tiger has not yet been wiped out, and the thought that this Pacific forest—reminiscent in some ways of the American and Canadian Northwest—had tigers in it gave the shadows far back among the trees a new level of authority. I had been in a few forests that held grizzly bears, but a forest with tigers in it seemed even more mysterious and honorable.
Rather than go straight to Olga, we turned off at a little road where a sign pointed to Vesyolyi Yar (Merry Cliff). This road as it led eastward and Pacific-ward was not particularly merry. The closer we approached the coast, the more falling-down military structures cluttered the scene. Overhead the sky got bluer and lighter simultaneously in an ever-brightening expansiveness that could only be a reflection of the Pacific just beyond. At the top of each rise I thought I’d see it. Then we came over a crest above an unusually steep descent, and there ahead, in the notch between two hills: the Pacific Ocean. Against the green of the trees it was a deep pelagic blue, with many white waves.
Past a few more hills and an abandoned gate-checkpoint, and then we were on a level, sandy road that served as the main street of another military ghost town. On either side of the road, block after block of three- or four-story cement residential buildings with most of their window glass out showed only occasional signs of human presence. An onshore breeze rattling through the ruins smelled like the sea and made the vacant place spookier.
I saw the water just in glimpses between the buildings, but then the road bore left and we were driving alongside the shore. We stopped and got out. Here we had arrived not at a regular beach, with big rollers coming in, but at the semifortified shore of Vladimirskaya Bay. The Pacific rollers I had hoped for could be seen in the distance, at the bay’s entrance between its northern and southern headlands. Here there was no strand, just rocks and broken cement and pieces of rusted iron, and a small black cow looking for something to eat among them. Between the road and the water, a twelve-foot-high observation tower leaned to one side; the hulks of two wrecked ships, one still with her stacks and superstructure, sat grounded and tilted over not too far out in the bay.
On the ocean-facing side of a big rock, someone had spray painted the NY logo of the New York Yankees and the LA logo of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Also in big white letters on the rock was the word RAP.
We drove along the shore a little farther until there were fewer ghost buildings. In this part, the beach was more beachlike and offered a better setting for our momentous arrival. Wave-smoothed stones and actual sand inclined down to clear and cold waves that were breaking hard on this windy day. Long fronds of kelp lay here and there like pieces of reel-to-reel tape. I put my hand in the water and cupped some of it and tasted salt. Sergei immediately stripped down to his briefs and dove in and swam. Volodya recorded the event with the video camera while I made a sketch of the bay and the ocean and the sky. During his dip, Sergei stepped on a sea urchin spine, a painful development, but he mentioned it only in passing among the shouting, hilarity, and mutual congratulations. Finally we were here. Today was Tuesday, September 11, 2001. We had crossed Russia by land from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean in five weeks and two days.
Chapter 22
Perhaps the reader is curious about how this trip ended and how I got home.
When I called my wife the next morning, September 12, I checked first to see what new punch lines Bill had e-mailed me; there were none. Instead I found a message from my wife saying she and the kids were all right. Then the call went through and I learned what that meant. In New York it was still the previous day, about seven o’clock at night. At that point no one knew how many thousands had died. My reactions to the news were the same as tens of millions of other people’s; the only difference was that as the lone American in this obscure corner of the Primorskii Krai I constituted a nation of one, my country’s lone representative. I told Sergei and Volodya what had happened, and they were great. They kept an eye on me without being overbearing as I retreated to my tent for a while and then wandered the near vicinity trying to begin to think about what had occurred.
We had made camp at the next bay down the shore from the ghost military base. This bay, called Olga Bay, had fewer military fortifications, and a river called the Avvakumovo came into it from the southwest. Spawning salmon were proceeding up the Avvakumovo in steady twos and threes. At the mouth of the river, near where we pitched our tents, an old drift log with many branches lay on the shore. All day long and into the night, local guys drove up in beat-up Japanese cars and then hung around for hours at the drift log. I could not figure out what these guys were doing. They just sat on the branches or the trunk and smoked cigarettes and drank beer and looked out over the water, and then sometimes they would all leave.
A day or two after the attacks, a deputation of these guys came to Sergei with a freshly caught salmon for him to present to me as a token of their sympathy for what had happened in America. The fish was a large female, maybe nine pounds, and with Volodya’s cooking skills it would provide us several good meals and fresh salmon eggs, too. When Sergei brought the fish to me, I felt actual love for the drift-log guys and was moved to tears.
After we’d been at the camp for another couple of days, I finally learned (Volodya told me) what these guys were up to. They were watching for the appearance of the fish inspector. Only a tiny number of fishermen had the necessary permits to put nets in the bay. The fish inspector, a dogged-looking person in a small aluminum outboard, came by often to make sure no unlicensed nets were out. As soon as he left the bay, the guys would go to their own boats hidden somewhere nearby, speed out into the bay, set their nets, and catch a few before he returned. They were poachers, in other words, and we were probably breaking the law merely by possessing the illegally caught fish they had given me. Somehow this discovery made their gift even more touching.
I tried to catch a salmon myself, without success. In the clear water I could see them just like in an aquarium. Occasionally they would jump just a few feet away from me, popping up in full profile like toast from a toaster. But they had no interest in any of my flies or lures; when one of my offerings came too near they would shy abruptly
to one side. The Avvakumovo River was full of fish. Schools of a fish broader than a salmon, but not as long—shad? striped bass?—were also spawning there. In slower water a bit upstream from the mouth, these fish followed one another around and around in rings until some point of tension was reached and they exploded from the formation with a splash that stirred up mud on the river bottom. Then the fish would regroup and start circling again.
On the surface of this slow place there were a lot of round, black water bugs. They resembled water striders, but they hopped across the water rather than strode. When the circling fish occasionally exploded directly beneath these water hoppers, I was sure I saw some of the bugs go under. I watched and watched to see if any of the bugs ever came back onto the surface from under it. As far as I could tell, none did. It is my opinion that no water strider or similar water-surface insect can return to the surface if it ever is unlucky enough to go under.
There were thousands of littler fish, too, hitting the surface constantly and leaving small round ripples like at the beginning of a rainstorm. Shorebirds ran along the bite-sized beaches the waves had cut into the birch and pine and swamp-maple forests that grew all the way down to the bay. Terns and gulls dove on the little fish with feathery splashes. Sometimes two mature bald eagles glided back and forth above. And as usual, we were under the supervision of a flock of crows and ravens, who walked more than they flew and provided commentary.
One afternoon Sergei and Volodya and I drove eighteen miles upstream on the Avvakumovo to explore. There the river ran through windings and pools of swimming-pool blue under old-growth taiga. The bottom was dark granite and gray gravel, devoid of all trash. This was a river you could have used on a fly-fishing calendar, with plentiful animal tracks in the sand and even a structure of sticks that could have been a beaver lodge at one of the pools. Volodya loaned me his hip boots and soon I was wading and casting flies to likely looking trout water for the first time on our journey.
For a while I fished deep and caught only a few brown minnows with big heads, similar to what we call sculpins in America. I had seen a few grasshoppers along the bank, so I switched to a large, bushy dry fly that I’ve had luck with in Montana during grasshopper season. My first cast with it produced an enthusiastic little strike. Laying the fly in a seam between fast-moving water and slow-, I got a swirl from what appeared to be a real fish. By the color on its side I knew it had to be a trout. A cast or two later I dropped the fly next to a half-sunken log and something sucked it in. The hooked fish veered out into deep and heavy current and held there awhile before I could lead it to the shallows. It was not huge—nine or ten inches at the most—but it was a trout, unmistakably. The name for it in Russian is forel, which is only the Russian version of the German Forelle, which means “trout.”
I held the fish just above the water on my wet palm. I had never seen such a fish. Its sides were a burnished silvery-gold and had big, almost oblong patches of a pale camouflage-olive color, with little black dots along the back. The dots all leaned toward the tail, as if they’d been tilted in that direction by hydrodynamics. The fish’s sides changed color depending on how you looked at them—they appeared platinum-silvery when viewed from above, but greenish-silver when you saw them from below. The forel reminded me of the little optical-square toys that used to come in cereal boxes, those whatnots that showed one picture from one angle and a different picture when turned the other way. With this fish in my hand I felt as if I’d captured an imaginary creature, a living distillation of Siberian forest light. I unhooked it without damage and set it back in the Avvakumovo.
Basically I was marking time. After the attacks I had decided to fly home from Vladivostok at the first opportunity. But no planes were flying into or within the United States, so like many travelers all over the world, I waited.
My thoughts about what had happened on September 11 swirled around without settling anywhere or producing any insight, except for one or two blunt ironies. Some of my friends had told me before I left that I was setting out on a foolishly dangerous journey, and as I went across Siberia I kept waiting for the disaster I had let myself in for. But I had reached my destination and no disaster had occurred. Meanwhile, a real nightmare that history held in store hit just a few miles from my supposedly safe starting point, and thirteen people from my suburban town of Montclair died in the attacks; and Merle Gehman, the local Boy Scout leader, father of my son’s best friend, Christian, had gone to work in the south tower of the Trade Center that morning, and escaped after the plane hit, and lost his IDs, and the next day, as he and his wife were getting his driver’s license replaced at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, my wife picked up Christian and our son after school, and Christian said, of his father’s escape, “He had blood all over him, but it was somebody else’s blood!”
Also, I remembered that when I used to live in downtown Manhattan, I often took visitors from Ohio to look at the city from the observation deck on the top of the north tower. The view from there was actually a bit disappointing, and nowhere near as good as the Empire State Building’s, because from the lower end of the island you could see mainly water, and the unimpressive buildings of Wall Street, and the green of New Jersey across the Hudson River. But that was the direction my guests and I naturally looked anyway—westward, toward Ohio, and home, and the American continent stretching beyond. For us the building we were standing at the top of was the World Trade Center in the same sense that America’s baseball championship was the World Series. To us, “World” meant “American”; in fact, we thought not at all about the rest of the actual world.
But out in the rest of the actual world, people were thinking about us, in the larger sense, and specifically about this building. The attacks that targeted it represented not so much the beginning of a new war as a cruelly and ingeniously updated new wrinkle in an old, old war, one going back almost to the beginning of Islam. The recently ended Cold War, in whose ruins Sergei and Volodya and I had been wandering, would have been difficult to explain to ancient ghosts who knew nothing about twentieth-century physics. But the September 11 attacks would have made perfect sense to, say, Saladin: the flying machines, the proud towers, the slaughtered innocents, the suicidal believers, are a simple story that exists out of time. To Yermak and the other Christian conquerors of Siberia’s Muslim khan, September 11 would have been easily understandable, and perhaps a further inducement to victory, had they heard its story while gathered around their smoky Tobol River campfires.
Sergei and Volodya, those party guys, had met two attractive widows at a birthday picnic near our campsite. Sveta and Natalia lived in the nearby village of Olga. Sveta, a sturdy, dark-haired, vivid-featured woman with a musical laugh, was charmed by Volodya’s tales. As Olga’s pharmacist, she had a position of importance in the town. Natalia, ginger-haired and blue-eyed, taught kindergarten and resembled a soft-spoken suburban mom. She gravitated toward Sergei. Each widow lived alone in a large apartment in the village. After we’d been at the campsite for several days, they invited us to stay with them. Sergei and I went to Natalia’s, Volodya to Sveta’s.
At Natalia’s I saw TV coverage of the attacks. The images looked even more chaotic and bizarre on Russian television. The pictures veered and tilted and went out of focus, with quick glimpses of familiar places and buildings careening by like objects being dumped into the trash. To judge only from the Russian coverage, you’d think the whole city had been destroyed. The Russian TV plotline seemed to be that the United States had started the whole problem in the first place by getting involved with bin Laden during the Soviet Afghan War. Then the station broke away to show President Putin’s speech to the Russian people about the attacks. Putin talked in subdued, concerned tones, as if he really did sympathize. He said that Russia was sending help to the United States immediately and that the two countries must work together to fight Islamic terrorism.
Natalia, with a schoolteacher’s patience, often took time to talk to me. She told me her tw
o sons were serving in the military, one in Chechnya and the other I forget where. Her husband had been a school bus driver. She showed me his photo—he was a long, slim fellow with blurry features and straight brown hair. After his second heart attack he had quit his job and spent all his time at home making wood carvings of tigers and repairing clocks. The apartment was full of clocks he had fixed and they rang and buzzed and chirped at various intervals.
Natalia gave me one of his carved tigers as a present and I gave her my last two Beanie Babies for her grandchildren. I asked her, just by the way, if she had ever seen a real tiger in the forest. She said she’d never seen one in the forest, but not long ago a tiger had walked down her street in Olga. She had taken a photo of it. The tiger in the snapshot she showed was skinny and shambly looking, walking along the pavement with its head to one side. Natalia said the tiger was sick and the police had shot it soon afterward.
With groceries we contributed, the widows made us dinners of red caviar, blini, cabbage soup, borscht with beef, pelmeni with sour cream, carrot salad, beet salad, cake, and the unavoidable endless cups of tea. I was sort of a fifth wheel during these evenings, and when my comprehension of what everybody was talking about went blank, I just sat there and brooded or daydreamed. Then every so often I would understand something they were saying, and I’d pitch in an observation or two, and they would think I’d been understanding all along. Once Sveta’s cat jumped in my lap and began rubbing against me and purring, and Sveta said, “Oh, that’s very strange, because usually that cat only likes women and doesn’t go near men.” I replied, “Da, i Ya nastoyashchii mushchina,” which means, “Yes, and I am a real man.” I mention this one-liner, self-indulgently, because it was only the third or fourth time in my life that I made Russian friends laugh in Russian when I was trying to.