by Frazier
“I learned geology at Saratov State University, in that city, which is on the Volga River. My special diploma work was about a small river, the Markha, which is in Yakutia and which runs into the Vilyui River. I was here first in 1954 to study the geology of this river, and after finishing my diploma I became attached to all this open space in Yakutia. I am a nature fan, my soul strives not to destroy but to create. To protect nature. I do not say this to flaunt it, I say it sincerely.
“My father was completely illiterate, and although it is necessary to say that we blame Soviet authority from time to time, and that there were a lot of bad things, like gulags, on the other hand neither my father nor my mother ever had a chance to finish even a single grade of school. They were poor, and there were three of us children in our family, and all three, my sister and brother and I, all of us received a higher education at federal expense. There were many like us in the Soviet Union. Please, don’t take it as my approval of Soviet authority. But really, ‘Uchit’sya, uchit’sya, uchit’sya’ [Study, study, and study], as Lenin told all young Communists—this really existed! Yes, in a way I was like Lomonosov, another poor boy who studied and who became a scientist.
“I arrived here in Yakutia to live in 1958. I was twenty-four years old. Here in Yakutia I liked, first of all, the purity of the country. Second, in Yakutia there were then comparatively few people who had studied at university, and most of the geology of Yakutia was unknown. Therefore I understood I had an opportunity here for interesting work. A new place, new people, and three hundred million square kilometers in Yakutia. Well, one can only dream about such work. At first the aim was as follows: to search for diamonds. We used various indicators as are found in South Africa, where so many diamonds are on the Kimberley plateau, and we looked for similar geologic structures. Basically we were searching for kimberlites.
“I don’t exaggerate when I say I really loved the geologists who came here and who I worked with. I loved the tribe of geologists here—quite seriously, sincerely, from the bottom of my heart. Mutual assistance, one should save a friend even at the expense of your own life. Sharing even the last piece of bread. I lived in Yakutsk but I worked in Yakutia everywhere. In summers we geologists went in groups for four months, maybe five or six months, living in tents in the taiga, in totally different places. Well, you can imagine, during half a year with the same people, you live and work like brothers and sisters.
“Well, it was very complex work. I was engaged in everything, maybe it is not necessary to tell you about all of it, but I was involved in every sort of thing—both oil and gas prospecting, iron ores, gold and diamonds and whatever. In the taiga we transported all our cargo on reindeer. We put twenty kilograms on a deer, there were sixty deer in a team, and a deer driver. Sometimes deer would fall. Very difficult work.
“Geology is not a profession, as we say, but a way of life. That attracted me, and I stayed. We were constantly studying the geological configuration of Yakutia, and as a result we made some unique discoveries. Not all the deposits we found were in this category, but some were absolutely unique. Udokan copper, for example, located in the Chita area on the border with Yakutia—this is one of the largest deposits of this copper in the world. Also of course there were very rare stones that we found. The best example is charoite. Three of us discovered charoite together—two Irkutsk geologists and I. I was the chief of the geological party that conducted the geological shooting of the formation where we found the charoite. Some eroded deposits in this formation looked unusual to us, so we hit them with a hammer—a geologist is always with a hammer—and we gathered samples of stones that we then brought back to Yakutsk, and our colleague, Vera Parfentyevna Rogova, named this stone ‘charoite.’ Since then it has been determined that charoite is a previously unknown stone. Also, no other deposits of charoite have been found anywhere in the world. Well, it is a very beautiful stone, it has been made into beautiful vases, some rich people even make basins for baths out of it.
“You ask what is my most favorite place in Yakutia, and I would not say that I have a most favorite, but there is a very beautiful river, the Chara. Charoite is named after it. The word means ‘a charm,’ or in plural, chary, it is sorcery, witchcraft. The rocks along this clear and pure Chara River are crumpled in folds, various and multicolored, green, blue, red, all capriciously bent. I have gone on vacation on a Danube River cruise, and people admire that river, of course. But the rocks there are gray. On the Chara there is such a combination of rocks! Do not think every cook praises only his own broth. I agree that the Danube is a good river, but the rocks on our Chara are more beautiful, in my opinion.
“I spoke earlier about Yakutsk as a clean place, and I can repeat: I have read much on ecology from meetings and international conferences, and I know there are problems of great importance for the whole globe. Let’s take oxygen, this is most important, its consumption still increases, but natural places that produce oxygen become always fewer and fewer. Yakutia is notable for huge areas occupied by woods. This is true of all Siberia, in fact. Approximately 85 to 88 percent of the Siberian woods is still intact. In Yakutia we have a strong movement for leaving Yakutia as an ecological oasis. Leave it untouched—woods, moss, tundra (which makes oxygen, too). That is first. Second, there are a lot of rivers here, with excellent pure water. There is certainly pollution, as in the places where steamships go along the Lena River. But all other rivers in Yakutia are extremely pure, with reserves of water for all mankind. There is also a deficiency of freshwater today on the planet, as is known. We in Yakutia have freshwater here. By preserving woods here we preserve these rivers. If we cut the woods down, the rivers will dry up, speaking simply. We are convinced that the main riches of Yakutia and Siberia in general are woods and pure water.
“Certainly, you know, there are minerals here about which I have already spoken, and maybe it is also necessary for mankind to extract them. I myself discovered deposits, I feel we cannot do without them, without them there will be no money, and people need somewhere to work. But how to organize this extraction? We have a proverb: I volki sytie i ovtsy tselye [The wolves are fed and yet the sheep are whole]. We will try to do both, extraction and preservation, but we believe our main task is the preservation of riches for generations to come.
“I assure you, I give my word to anybody, that 90 percent of our taiga territory today is absolutely pure. That is, there is no infection, no illness, no pollution. I can sincerely tell you, I worrylessly take a mug, or a cup, or a glass, and I come up to any puddle, and I scoop and drink, and I am not afraid. All of us who journey in the taiga do this, and not a single time was anybody poisoned. I actually put bread right on the ground. I put sausage on moss. All of us agree—as soon as we leave the city we can put anything on the grass. Do not think that we are savages. No. We understand that in other places there is infection and pollution. But here in our taiga I am sure I won’t be poisoned. In this sense Yakutia is good for tourists who want to look at nature and not be afraid. We have plenty of such completely clean places here.”
Somewhere along the academy’s dim corridors were two museums, one devoted to the geology of Yakutia and the other to its paleontology. Both opened to visitors only by invitation. Sergei Shibaev said we should see them and he made a call, and an elderly female curator with an assistant appeared. The geology museum resembled a cross between a museum and a packed-full storeroom, with exhibits and wooden storage cases crowding one another along narrow aisles. Anatoly Petrov, who accompanied us, proudly produced a box of samples of charoite, which is a gaudy purplish stone, exactly in keeping with the country’s overall color scheme. Studying a photo display on the wall, I tried to make visual sense of the big black-and-white panoramas of Yakutia’s Mirny diamond mine, which appeared as a giant, tiered, conical hole in the earth with tiny trucks spiraling down into it. The curators passed around glass-topped wooden boxes divided into compartments, each of which contained a Yakutia diamond. The diamonds came in many s
izes, from lima bean to regular aspirin pill size, and their tints ranged from clear to pewter to champagne. They rattled richly in their boxes when shaken.
I asked our guides who the dark-featured nineteenth-century fellow in a large oil portrait was, and they identified him as V. A. Obruchev, the pioneer geologist of eastern Siberia. As it happened, I had read some of Obruchev’s memoir, Moi Puteshestviia po Sibiri (My Travels Through Siberia) when I was in St. Petersburg; at the time, I had the unachievable ambition of reading at least some of every known book with “Siberia” and “Travels” in its title. V. A. Obruchev first came to Siberia in the fall of 1888 to take a job with a newly established government department for geological explorations in Irkutsk, and he brought along his wife and seven-month-old son. The parents bundled the baby carefully for the journey in an inner sack of oilcloth and an outer sack of rabbit fur, with a down cap on his head. In the book’s photographs the faces of the Obruchevs are hard to make out in the depths of their winter clothing.
The paleontology museum, down another twilit corridor, brought to mind the controlled confusion of an auto parts shop, with various sections of fossilized mammoths instead of radiators and transmissions lying around. I have already mentioned the museum’s mammoth leg, with its well-preserved long hair, and the fossilized mammoth stomach cut crosssection to reveal the packed grasses of a last meal fossilized inside. There were mammoth tusks curling like untrimmed parentheses, and mammoth teeth, and pieces of fossilized mammoth hide with fur still on them, and a photo on the wall of a famous “mammoth graveyard” along a riverbank, where thousands of specimens had been found. A big part of the room was taken up by the outsize skeleton of a prehistoric rhinoceros (nosorog, in Russian) that had been found in Yakutia and that represented, according to the curator, the most complete skeleton of this animal in the world. On the wall above the rhino hung a bison skull resembling in every detail (ghostly eye sockets, tapering nostrils, scaly horns) any bison skull one might see in an Indian museum in the American West, except this skull was at least half again as large. It had belonged to one of our American bison’s Siberian ancestors in the millennia before the species crossed the Bering Land Bridge, adapted to the American environment, and shrank in size.
Chapter 27
I had wanted to go from Yakutsk to the village of Oimyakon, said to be the coldest place on earth outside Antarctica. After looking into the details of this journey, the two Sergeis advised against it. The distance to Oimyakon was about six hundred miles, many of them on difficult, mountainous roads, and by the time we got there the village would be in the middle of its Polus Kholodnii (Pole of Cold) Festival, which might create problems finding a place to stay. Time and money considerations seemed to put Oimyakon out of reach.
The Sergeis suggested that instead he and I go on that same northeast-bound highway out of Yakutsk, only not as far, and make our first stop at the village of Khandyga. From Khandyga we could continue to the village of Tyoplyi Kliuch (Warm Spring), where we could visit a museum about the gulag. Past Tyoplyi Kliuch, a smaller and less-traveled road branched off heading farther north. This road went about 125 miles to a village called Topolinoe, which was a Even settlement where we could see reindeer and native performances and dances. I agreed to this second plan. What decided me was that along the Topolinoe road, they said, we would pass the ruins of gulag labor camps.
At nine o’clock on a Wednesday morning, with the temperature at −25°F, a Russian-made jeep called a Uazik (after its initials, UAZ, which stand for Ulianovskii Avtomobilnyi Zavod, or Ulianovsk Automobile Works; the first word comes from Lenin’s original last name, Ulianov) arrived in front of the Sterkh Hotel to take us the two-hundred-some miles to Khandyga. Of the Uazik’s driver, I find I have preserved nothing in my notes except his cigarette; the smoke and the diesel fumes in the jeep had me hacking for days.
Just outside Yakutsk, the road descended to the surface of the Lena River, and then it continued on the ice for about twelve miles. On Lake Baikal’s ice road, I recalled, we had seen other vehicles only occasionally. This Lena River ice road roared like a major highway, with a heavy traffic of cars and trucks going in each direction. Slowdowns at bumps or cracks made the flow bumper-to-bumper sometimes. Baikal’s frozen surface could have been a salt flats or an endless snow-covered parking lot, but on the Lena, with its windings and the way the land was, you never forgot you were on a river. No matter how slow the traffic, almost no cars veered from the established roadway to take shortcuts across the ice.
After an hour or so, the traffic thinned out. We had left the river and were driving fast on a road of gravel covered with snow in a countryside sort of like Wisconsin’s, with white fields, gray forests, and low hills. And, of course, completely lacking in fences. A brown sleigh full of round hay bundles zipped along the snow beside the road, the hooves of the shaggy horses tossing up clods of dirt and snow. In some fields the same kind of horses, hippie-haired in the mane and equally shaggy on the sides and in their tails, grazed the snow-covered ground with their heads buried up to the ears. The few cows we passed looked cold and resentful, breathing out steam, while ravens with no apparent purpose hopped and made random miniflights along the roadside.
At about two hundred miles from Yakutsk we came to the Aldan River. Aside from the tire tracks on the river’s surface where we were about to drive across it, the Aldan showed no sign at all of human presence. Its wide floodplain, its long, uneven shoreline in the far distance opposite, and its border of dark or bare-branched trees in the winter haze could have been a Missouri River landscape from the days of Lewis and Clark.
We arrived in Khandyga at about five thirty in the afternoon and pulled up in front of the village’s central administration building, into which Sergei and the driver disappeared. I stayed in the Uazik, and after a minute a marshrutka public-transport van parked beside me. On the van’s sliding door was written:
Nu vy blin daete
khlopnesh’ Dverio—
Umryosh ot montirovki.
With nothing else to do right then, I took out my dictionary and tried to translate that. Literally, it said, “Well you darn give a slam with the door—you die from being mounted.” When Sergei came back, I asked him about the last words and he said they meant “from being hit with a tire iron.”
Recently Sergei had started acting sullen and fed up again. We had been traveling together for almost three weeks; conceivably, I was getting on his nerves. I asked him if we were going to visit the gulag museum in Khandyga now and he said, “What gulag museum? Did you read there was a gulag museum here? Where did you hear there was a gulag museum here?” I said Sergei Shibaev had been talking about the Khandyga gulag museum yesterday. He said, “There is no gulag museum here. The gulag museum is another hundred kilometers from here.” In fact, I had forgotten that the museum was not in Khandyga but in Tyoplyi Kliuch, sixty miles farther up the road. The waspishness of his reaction caused me to worry I was being taken on a snipe hunt, and I would once again see no prisons or evidence of same.
Khandyga had been a major military base until a few years before, and part of the village was still set off behind high fences made of those prefab cement panels that are everywhere in Siberia. The Aldan River ran beside the town. A wide and much-driven-on ramp of ice-covered earth led from the village down to the river’s surface. On a stroll I took in the light remaining that afternoon, I went down the ramp and suddenly had to hop aside to avoid an empty coal truck as it sped around a corner. The truck descended the ramp and drove onto the roadway leading across the Aldan. Soon after that a truck came along in the opposite direction, crossing the river and climbing the ramp to the town. The incoming truck carried a full load of coal.
Khandyga ran on coal, it devoured coal. A tall brick stack above the village emitted, nonstop, a towering conical billow of dark gray, as one would expect on a −22° afternoon. The usual insulated steam pipes laced the village with their meanderings, and where the heat was escaping from the mo
re run-down houses you could tell the location of the cracks by the elaborate, pure-white excrescences of frost that had built up around them. Some of these frost blooms were huge, like an outsize bole or a clot of dried sap on the side of a tree.
Because of the constant fall of coal soot, the crust of the snow in the village was a crystal amalgam of ice, snow, and dust. Over the winter the snow had piled up until it was maybe four feet deep in the uncleared and untrodden places. Snow topped the village’s many abandoned cars with Elvis-like coxcombs. Where shoveling had dug pathways, you could see the individual snowfalls delineated like layers of sediment in a road cut. After every snowfall, evidently, enough coal dust had fallen to leave a black residue. Then the next snow had arrived, and atop that a new layer of coal dust had accumulated, and so on. Seen in cross section, the snow of Khandyga was striped black and white like a torte.
Noting, as I often do, whatever happens to be on the ground at my feet, I came across a piece of litter in Khandyga that I nominate for special international recognition. This particular item, which I picked up and saved like a botanical specimen, was a pill packet formerly containing individually wrapped pills, each in its own bubble of foil affixed to the packet’s cardboard backing. I know I can find a similar piece of litter—same cardboard (or plastic) backing, same little foil bubbles with the foil torn and the contents removed—anytime I want on the streets near my house in New Jersey. Because I’ve encountered it close to home, and all over Russia, and in Khandyga at the almost end of the earth, I assume that item of litter to be a globally universal thing. Its ubiquity has caused me to wonder what it is called. Among manufacturers of packaging, the name of this object is the “blister pack.” I believe the blister pack might be the most widely distributed single item of litter in the world.