Travels in Siberia (51 page)

When Sergei went into a store at noontime to buy bread in the small city of Bikin, he soon returned and asked me to come inside. He had told one of the salesladies that he was traveling with an American, and she had asked if she could see me. Obligingly, he presented me to her. This saleslady was another Russian beauty, though not at all the kind who wears low-rider jeans and pinpoint high heels on the streets of St. Petersburg or Chita. Instead she brought to mind the heroic ladies on Communist posters extolling motherhood—she was matronly, pink cheeked, with vivid dark eyes, and the tunic under her clean white apron left her big, strong-looking arms bare.

She and I talked for a while. She asked me where I was from and I said New Jersey, and she asked if that was a city. I said it was a state, not a city, but it was very near New York City. She had heard of that. She told me that she had seen many Americans in the cinema and on television but I was the first American she had ever seen
zhivoi
—living, in the flesh. She thanked Sergei for bringing me in. Then she asked us to wait and went into the back room and brought out a kielbasa too special to be put out on general display, and we bought it from her.

Like most cities of military importance, Bikin had been closed to foreigners until after the end of Soviet times. With the Chinese border only twelve miles away, Bikin formerly was fortified with active military installations all around it, and now their barbed wire dangled and their concrete works had turned ramshackle in predictable post-Soviet style. And yet Bikin still had the cloistered feel of a garrison town. Afterward I read that during the Great Patriotic War, a husband and wife in another closed city of the Far East had given Stalin their fifty-thousand-ruble family savings in order to pay for a tank to fight the fascists; their patriotic gesture received much publicity, as did the couple’s being allowed to operate the tank themselves against the Nazis. After the USSR entered
the war against Japan in 1945, a mechanic in Bikin, inspired by this couple’s example, donated his life savings to buy a tank so he could personally fight the “samurai.” Unluckily for the Bikin mechanic, however, Japan surrendered soon after and he never got his chance.

Past Bikin we entered the Primorskii Krai and the last leg of our journey. If we kept going south on the road we were on we would arrive in Vladivostok in a day or so. But what then? At Vladivostok we would have reached our destination and our trip would be done. And probably we wouldn’t stay in Vladivostok; our money had begun to run low, making Sergei even more opposed to the idea of paying for a room. And camping places within range of a city that size were unlikely to be too good.

None of these end-of-trip complications seeming attractive, I agreed with Sergei’s suggestion that instead we turn east, cross the Sikhote-Alin Mountains, and arrive at the Pacific (more precisely, its Sea of Japan) in a less-inhabited place on the mountains’ other side. We’d certainly find better camping spots along the shore. And, that way, when we finally did get to salt water, it would be the open ocean, not the domesticated and no doubt dirty version of it in Vladivostok’s harbor. We could always see Vladivostok later when we were about to go home.

Soon after Bikin we suddenly entered a weird all-watermelon area. Watermelon sellers crowded both sides of the road under big umbrellas in beach-ball colors among wildly painted wooden signs. Sergei pulled over and bought a watermelon for a ruble, but as we went along, the heaps of them kept growing until melons were spilling into the road and the sellers were giving them away. A man with teeth like a crazy fence hailed us and in high hilarity thrust two watermelons through the passenger-side window. By the time we had emerged at the other end of the watermelon gauntlet, we had a dozen or more in the van. The watermelons were almost spherical, antifreeze green, and slightly smaller than soccer balls. We cut one open—delicious. This was not a part of the world I had previously thought of as a great place for watermelons.

V. K. Arsenyev, when leading his Sikhote-Alin expedition in 1906, took the railway south to just beyond the Ussuri River bridge. Then he disembarked from the train and headed east through the taiga. We turned east about seventy-five miles farther on, at the town of Spassk-Dalnyi. The Sikhote-Alin mountains, once we were among them, seemed
more like hills, and not very forbidding, but the depth and silence of their forest made up for that. Arsenyev had described the taiga here as “virginal, primeval timberland.” From the height of the trees and the venerable length of the vines depending from them I would guess that the taiga we saw was still original growth. That night we camped above the small gorge of a river named for Arsenyev—the Arsenevka. The sound of it was pleasant to sit beside; this was our first genuinely rushing stream. I stayed up for a while after Sergei and Volodya had gone to bed, listening to it and looking up at the stars and at the satellites tracking past.

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.

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.