Travels in Siberia (18 page)

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 wood 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.

Our visit quickly became a mob scene. Crowds of Yndrekanute citizens of all ages gathered around us, thanking us for America’s help, saying hello, trying to sell us stuff, or doing all three. The faces that Karen was hoping to photograph had to be shot at extremely close range. With prompting, some of the subjects did see the problem and stood back a few feet and posed. I broke away on my own and with a dwindling entourage walked the side streets of the village, which was in better shape all in all than its Soviet-era leftovers had led me to think. Most of the houses were of stucco and lath construction, trim and cozy looking, with salmon hanging all along the eaves to dry, wooden ladders leading to outside attic doors, and neat yards. Some had front walks made of the old rubber drive treads of snow machines. Chairs in front of many houses faced the village’s sea view, a sweep of mountains and ocean widening eastward to a full Bering Strait horizon. I saw a row of chairs made of three linked folding seats, like in a theater, next to three stools made of whale vertebrae.

Along with photos, the Californians wanted souvenirs, and they had no trouble finding plenty among the crowd. Mittens, fur hats, toy dogsleds,
sealskin boots—soon the Californians were loaded down. As they slowly wound their way back to the boats, they were a heavily laden parade, with villagers thronging around, bringing more stuff, laughing, calling out to one another. At the center of the excitement, Karen carried a set of reindeer antlers and wore her new hat of reddish-gray fox fur with big earflaps. She was smiling a triumphant smile.

We stayed at the fish camp another few days. We were there only about a week in all, but I felt I could have lived there for months. The routine of it suited me. I continued to keep an eye on the nets, and every so often I helped Ivan pull them and knock the accumulated seaweed off them with a tool like a carpet beater. I also read, ate Valentina’s good cooking, walked. Growing tired of my leaky Junior Outdoorsman tent, I asked Ivan if he had room for me in his tent, and he said sure. His was a two-man Russian army model of heavy canvas, which he had floored with furs artfully piled one upon another so that when you lay down your head was higher than your feet. It’s still the most comfortable tent I ever slept in. Another storm came, and the Russian flag he had erected on the beach nearby cracked like a whip as the wind swept by. I read by flashlight in the tent and drifted off.

On a morning when the sea conditions had moderated, we started back for Provideniya. I went in Gennady’s boat and marveled at the exactness with which he turned into each wave we crossed, heading the bow at an angle that brought the crest of the swell within half an inch of the gunwale, and then angling back the other way as we descended into the trough. When we reached the take-out point at the end of the fjord and had to wait for the others, Ivan sheltered beneath a turned-over boat someone had left there. Then he produced a blowtorch, lit it, applied its flame to a blackened teapot, and boiled water for tea. The same military vehicle with the same no-comment Russian driver had come to pick us up. The driver joined us for tea and in a low voice asked Ivan what these foolish Americans had done at the fish camp—sit all day in the cabin by the stove? Ivan told him that this American (pointing to me) had walked farther and found more mushrooms than he, the driver, ever could. The driver looked at me. He showed an unpersuasive grin consisting of metals of different kinds and said no more.

Back in Provideniya, I spent another evening at Ira and Edward’s watching videos and talking, as before. Edward told me that most people in Provideniya wanted to move to either Alaska or western Russia. He said it was possible to buy a big apartment in Provideniya now for just a couple of thousand dollars. Igor, their little boy, was ill with fever and did not come out of his room. In the morning I let myself out very early and walked the town—up Dezhnev Street, down Polarnaya, and along the waterfront. The tall row of cargo cranes by the docks stood rusting and idle; 150 ships used to come here every year, Tanya had told us, but this season the port had seen fewer than a dozen. And yet just outside the bay I could make out a long pennant of diesel smoke from an approaching cruise ship, part of Provideniya’s new tourist equation. I wondered what the tourists would find to do.

At the end of a point of land, past a last crumbling high-rise, I happened upon a graveyard. Like many lonely places in Russia, it had weathered its share of drunken vandalism. Tiny pieces of liquor bottles that had been thrown hard against the stones gave a holiday sparkle to the ground. Memorial busts had been smashed, their noses broken off. Flower vases had been tipped over and cracked. Some of the grave markers bore enameled photo portraits of the deceased set into ovals in the stone. A picture of a woman named Elena featured those intense, empathetic dark eyes you sometimes see in young Russian women. She had been born in 1957 and had died at the age of thirty-six. Lots of the people in the cemetery had died in their thirties. At the foot of one marker, centered neatly on its broad stone base, sat a Russian military cap. It had a shiny black bill and one of those extrahigh fronts with an emblem on it—the kind of hat formerly seen on the heads of generals reviewing a May Day parade. I wanted to pick it up and examine it, but I let it be.

At Nina’s, the Californians were getting ready for departure, saying things like, “Has anybody seen my black bag?” Nina told me a long story about another of her daughters, an unlucky young woman whose husband, she said, had tried to kill her. Amid the confusion, six-year-old Igor suddenly appeared; he had stopped by, Nina said, to tell me goodbye. Igor stood very formally with the top button of his shirt buttoned and his mouth held in a straight line. I asked him if he had recovered from his fever and he said, “
Konechno
” (Naturally). We shook hands and I promised I would send him some Legos. After I was back home I did send him some, but I don’t know if they ever arrived.

At the airport, surprisingly, a line of people were already waiting at the outgoing customs checkpoint. Just ahead of our party stood some guys from Mason City, Iowa, who had obtained a quick-visit visa in Nome and had flown over in their own plane on a whim to see what Russia was like. They told us they didn’t think much of it. From some inner airport office V——, the Chukotka minister of tourism, emerged with a couple of aides. The minister had curly blond hair, blue eyes, and the personable manner of a casino greeter. He spoke English well and asked the people in line if they’d had a good time. He got to our party right before we went through the door. In his spotless blue warm-up jersey and pants highlighted with parallel white stripes on the sides, he shook our hands and listened with his head cocked inquisitively. Seizing the moment, Karen said to him, “V——, Sandy here [indicating me] told us that most of the money we paid for this trip was spent on bribes. Is that really true?”