Travels in Siberia (14 page)

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.

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.

Then, the gizmos we began to see! As we neared the terminal buildings, we passed lots of old, Cold War, formerly high-tech electronic stuff, antennae and whatnot, all of it silhouette black and leaning one way or another, disconnected wiring dangling from it, and poles holding up wires in such quantity that they had to be strung on circular frames at intervals to separate them from one another, and stumps of poles, and guy wires running diagonally, and corkscrew-shaped contraptions dark against the sky—the total effect was as if a mad scientist in an old horror movie had done some of his monster-animating experiments here, and then had been discovered by the villagers and chased off, and all his mad-scientist equipment had been left out in the weather to fall apart gradually.

The colors, too, were of a different kind. Kennan had been right about that. Russia occupies its own universe, chromatically. Near where we taxied to a stop sat a Russian car of a particularly Russian version of green.
I guess it was an apple green, but to call it that is to reimagine the apple. It was a bright, bilious, chemical-spill version of apple green. Russian colors sometimes make my gums ache. And on our right stood the Aeroflot terminal, a building that appeared to have been constituted entirely of shiny chrome. It resembled a hugely outsized bumper from an SUV, only an SUV transported, in design terms, back to about 1963.

The plane door opened and two women soldiers in their twenties escorted us across the tarmac to the entry room for international passengers. The women wore camo jackets and square-heeled high heels with buckles in the shape of hammers and sickles. They were dark haired, pretty, and bored. (Of the beauty of Russian women I will say more later.) Strange bursts of gunfire, and louder explosions, sounded all around. Larry explained that the Russians were dismantling the military base and had begun to shoot off the extra ammunition rather than take the trouble to ship it out.

When I entered the cold terra-cotta-tiled room where we were to fill out our customs declaration forms, I encountered an old friend: the smell of Russia. How do they do it? Here on the edge of the Bering Strait, five thousand miles from Moscow, almost within wafting distance of the U.S.A., the Russia-smell is exactly the same! I breathed it deeply. Yes, it was all there—the tea bags, the cucumber peels, the wet cement, the chilly air, the currant jam. About the only point of similarity between this smell and the one I’d just left in Nome was the overtone of diesel exhaust. But, still fresh from America, I understood that America’s essential smell is nothing at all like Russia’s. America smells like gift shop candles, fried food, new cars. America’s is the smell of commerce. The smell of Alaska that stays with me the strongest is that of the Cinnabon sweet rolls shop in the Anchorage airport; I’m sure the scent of Cinnabon is set adrift everywhere in that space intentionally, in order to ensnare passersby. The smell of America says, “Come in and buy.” The smell of Russia says, “Ladies and gentlemen: Russia!”

And there at the top of a poorly lighted staircase (why not try using a bigger lightbulb every once in a while, guys?) stood an older lady, a customs officer, beckoning us along. She smiled. In the dimness, her single gold tooth flashed like a Russian Welcome sign.

Provideniya, a city closer to America than Dallas is to Houston, was built mostly in the 1930s by slaves. Or “convict laborers,” as we were told by Tanya, the bibulous copper-blond former ballerina who introduced herself to us at the airport as our guide. The laborers would have been in the custody of Dalstroi, the giant prison and construction combine, a fiefdom of the KGB, that ran the entire Soviet Far East. Perhaps in revenge for how it was built, Provideniya was now falling apart sort of spectacularly. On our way from the airport we passed rows and rows of smashed-out windows, and cement buildings of four and five stories all abandoned and hollow eyed, crumbling like sand castles that had been rained on. From some entryways, small waterfalls flowed down the broken front steps and into the potholed road. Apartment buildings rose from the street front in long horizontal terraces, decay and disintegration apparent everywhere, with occasionally a window still intact and a sack of provisions dangling from it—evidence of someone still living there, Tanya said. She added that the city had not had coal for its central-heating boilers in seven months, since early February. I had been in a ghost town before, but never a whole ruined city.

The idea was that we would spend one night in Provideniya, visit the museum and the power station, and then travel by boat and off-road vehicle to a camp of Chukchi reindeer herders on the tundra, where we would stay in reindeer-skin dwellings called
yurangis
. From the reindeer camp we would continue to a Yupik fishing camp at the mouth of a river, where there were hot springs and a chance to observe interesting sea mammals. However, something had come up. In an office at the ethnological museum in the middle of the city, our real guide, Vladimir Bychkov, whom it turned out Tanya had only been filling in for, explained the problem to us.

Vladimir Bychkov has brown eyes and a well-trimmed dark beard, and he looks maybe Persian. He is the son of a former Soviet army officer and was born in 1963 at the military base at Ureliki. A geography teacher during the school year, he is a mild, sensible, and intelligent man. In good English and with a serious expression he told us that the day before, a party of thirty-seven Yupiks from the village of Novo Chaplino in Chukotka, who had been visiting their American relatives on St. Lawrence Island on the U.S. side of the Bering Strait, had set out on the sixty-five-mile journey home. Their visas were about to run out, so they
took a chance with the threatening weather. Soon after they left port, a storm came up (the same one that delayed us in Nome). Many of the Yupiks were in small aluminum boats with low-horsepower outboards, and the waves had been too much for them. Some had been able to jump to the large whaleboats of their companions, but two Yupiks, a father and son, had drowned. Their family name was Severov. Vladimir had known them. Most of the group had arrived in Provideniya thirty hours after they had started. They had thrown their belongings overboard to lighten their boats and thus lost the stuff they were bringing back from America, a big objective of the journey. Also, three boats carrying a total of six men remained unaccounted for.