Travels in Siberia (27 page)

When I went back to St. Petersburg for a quick visit in June to take care of some final details, I learned that Victor Serov would not be guiding me himself. Victor would do the planning, he informed me, but his colleague, Sergei Lunev, would be the actual guide. Victor had worked with Sergei on other expeditions. He had been Victor’s mountaineering coach at university, and together they had climbed peaks in the Caucasus and Crimea. Both had also climbed in Kamchatka, though on separate expeditions. Sergei was a “good man,” Victor assured me, underlining his pronouncement with a brisk, military nod.

Zdravstvuite
, Sergei! Greetings to you and family! I ended up spending more time at a stretch with Sergei than I ever have with anybody except my family. With nobody else except those closest to me have I ever been so deeply annoyed. Maybe he could say the same about me. Often I composed long and stern speeches to Sergei in my head, though I could translate only fragments of them. I saw more country with Sergei than I ever did with anybody, and eventually I agreed completely with Victor’s judgment of him. Early on, I admired his ingenuity and toughness. Learning to trust him, though, took a while.

The impression I got when we first met did not help. Victor had said he would bring Sergei to Luda’s apartment to meet me, and I had arranged to be waiting for them on Zagorodnyi Prospekt out front. They arrived in Victor’s car and parked across the street. I crossed to that side
to greet them, and before we’d even shaken hands Sergei came up close and grasped my elbow and steered me back across through traffic, like a Boy Scout helping an old lady. That sort of gave me the creeps (a word whose Russian equivalent,
murashki
, also means “small ants”). Later when I became upset with him, I sometimes felt a dark regret that I hadn’t paid more attention to my first impression. Later still, I understood that the gesture hadn’t signified much of anything, besides a certain exaggerated Russian deference and courtliness. It was just the way Sergei was.

Sergei Mikhailovich Lunev is a muscular and youthfully fit man in his midsixties. He looks like a gymnast, or a coach of gymnasts. He has a long, ectomorphic head whose most expressive feature is its brow, which furrows this way and that in thought, emphasizing his canny, mobile, and china-blue eyes. The neatly trimmed hair around his balding crown adds a professorial dignity—appropriately, because he is the head of the robotics lab at the St. Petersburg State Polytechnical University. He used to work in the Soviet space program before it was reduced in size; guiding is something he does for extra cash. After knowing him for a while I wondered if the discontent and suppressed anger that sometimes showed on his face were the result of taking on an additional job, one unequal to his talents. We did seem to get along better once I understood how prestigious the Polytechnical University and his real job were.

I had asked him and Victor to come to Luda’s partly at her request. She wanted to have a look at these sharp characters who she was sure were taking advantage of a naïve American; she also wanted to quiz them about the Siberian perils into which they were leading me. She conducted the investigation over tea and snacks in her apartment. I followed only some of it, but I believe she went into the subject of bears, and particularly what the guides planned to do if bears bit the tires of our vehicle and punctured them. Victor laid out his and Sergei’s credentials and answered all questions patiently and in detail. At the end of the session she was less doubtful, but only marginally.

From Luda’s, Victor and Sergei and I drove to a labyrinthine warren of single-vehicle garages in a far section of St. Petersburg. I had wanted to buy a Russian all-road vehicle like a four-wheel-drive jeep Niva. Victor had said that was a bad idea, because Russian vehicles constantly break down. (On our journey, after I’d seen the thousandth Niva by the side of
the road with its hood up and the driver peering under it, I appreciated this truth.) Instead, with $4,500 supplied by me, he and Sergei had bought a diesel-powered Renault step van. They promised me this car was far more reliable.

In the narrow, low-ceilinged garage where Sergei was keeping it, the Renault struck me as not Siberia-ready. It looked more suited to delivering sour cream and eggs, the job it had done until recently. Sergei backed it out and we went for a quick test-drive. Its shocks weren’t much and its stick shift was stiff. Sergei said he would have it running smoothly in time for the journey. He said he planned to put an extra seat in the back and a place to store our stuff, and a table where we could eat when it rained. I noticed there were no seat belts and said that each seat must have one. Sergei and Victor conceded that seat belts could be added if I wanted them. They treated this as an eccentric special request. Russians in general do not use seat belts and consider them an American absurdity.

Sergei described how he would arrange the back so we could sleep in there if necessary. I didn’t see quite how this would work, especially when I learned there would be three of us—Vladimir Chumak, called Volodya or Vitya, who was another past associate of Victor’s and Sergei’s, had been asked to come along as an assistant. Sergei and Volodya had been in Kamchatka together and had known each other since university. Victor said that three men were better than two for safety. That sounded sensible to me. Both my companions praised Volodya Chumak as a top-notch alpinist and great guy. He lived in Sochi, a resort town on the Black Sea, where he employed his alpinist skills in his regular job as a building renovator, rappelling down the façades of buildings he was restoring. I would not meet him until just before the trip began.

There are almost no motels in Siberia. Most of the time Sergei and Volodya and I would be camping out, or else staying in people’s houses. Sergei and Victor would supply tents, propane stove, camp chairs, and other gear. I was to bring my own sleeping bag, eating utensils, personal items, etc. I asked if I should buy a travel directory of Siberian campgrounds, and Victor laughed. He said I would understand better what Siberia was like once I got there.

To celebrate, we then drove outside the city to Sergei’s dacha. Just before it we passed a village that Victor said he remembered as a lovely
place in his childhood, but Khrushchev ruined it. The remnants of the village could still be seen, crumbling at the feet of out-of-place and also crumbling 1950s-era high-rises. Sergei’s dacha, in a woodland clearing filled with many other dachas, reminded me of family cottages in Ohio on the shores of Lake Erie before the modern age. It was a plain, unpainted board structure, just walls and a roof. Sergei’s wife, Luda, met us at the door with their twelve-year-old grandson, Igor. We picked wild strawberries, walked to a pond; some of us swam. During a dinner of shashlik—marinated pork skewered on thin sticks and cooked by Sergei on a wood fire—Victor made an emotional toast to the great adventure Sergei and I would soon be embarking on. And while we were walking in the woods, Sergei came up beside me and said, with passion and sincerity, how happy he was to be going on this trip with me.

The reader may be wondering how I happened to have the money to pay for this expedition. The answer is that I received an expense advance from a magazine. George Kennan in 1884 financed his Siberian journey with an advance of $6,000 from the
Century
magazine in New York City. For my trip in 2001, I was advanced $22,000 by
The New Yorker
magazine. Kennan’s trip was ten months long; mine would be about seven weeks. Six thousand dollars back then would be about $112,000 today.

The American dollars I imported strengthened the Russian market for used delivery vans, vehicle-interior improvements, diesel-engine parts, trip-consultant fees, groceries, motor oil, preowned GPS navigating devices, water jugs of flexible plastic, collapsible metal-and-canvas camp stools, pith helmets with drawstring veils of mosquito netting, and other Siberia-related miscellany. During my own preparations when I returned to New Jersey, more of the advance went for additional mosquito netting, olive-drab plastic bottles of high-strength insect repellent with DEET, a kit of camp toiletries, a small suitcase-load of presents (boxes of Legos, assorted Beanie Baby dolls, Statue of Liberty key chains, snow globes featuring the New York City skyline, pocket mirrors, bass-fisherman baseball caps, Swiss army knives for the guides); also, iodine pills, new carbon filters for my water purifier, SPF 40 sunblock, ziplock bags, energy bars, pocket packs of Kleenex, a plastic tarp, a pen that can write in zero gravity . . .

Anybody going to remote parts of Asia is advised to get vaccinations of various kinds. At a travel clinic in New Jersey, I was administered shots for typhoid, hepatitis A, tetanus, and polio. Hepatitis B, also recommended, requires shots spaced six months apart for full effectiveness, so I skipped that one. A clinic doctor gave me prescriptions for Cipro antibiotic and said I should buy other medications also for intestinal ailments. He warned against tickborne encephalitis, a danger east of the Urals; he said there’s no vaccine against it and no cure. Fortunately, the ticks that have it are infectious only in the spring. The doctor asked if I would be carrying firearms and I said the guides would be. This surprised him. He had never advised anybody going to Siberia before.

A big expense was the satellite phone. I didn’t think I would need one, but my wife insisted. She took care of finding and buying it. From Outfitter Satellite in Nashville, she ordered an Iridium brand phone made by Motorola. Outfitter Satellite also handles the satellite linkage and gives you a troubleshooting number to call. In the event, I did use that number; deep in Siberia it was strange suddenly to be talking to a technician with a Tennessee drawl. This $1,000 piece of equipment, when it arrived in its foam-padded case, looked like a combination of a cell phone and a field radio. It had an extendable antenna shaped like a pistol barrel, and many accessories—batteries that cost $85 each, a battery recharger, two kinds of foreign-current adapters for the battery charger, another charger attachment that fit into the cigarette lighter of a car, a remote antenna for use on the roof of the car, and so on.

I wanted to make sure that the phone worked and I knew how to use it. I took the phone into our backyard, turned it on, waited for a satellite hookup, and made a call. The signal went from me to one of the system’s sixty-six satellites in low-earth orbit about five hundred miles above. The satellite passed the signal to another satellite, which passed it to another, and so on, until it was relayed down to the Iridium “gateway station” in Tempe, Arizona, which then sent it along regular long-distance routing to my house. In about a second and a half, our downstairs phone rang. Looking at each other through the back window, my wife and I kept our conversation brief, because rates for this kind of phone are in the $4-per-minute range.

Victor had said that a trip later in the summer would avoid the worst of Siberia’s insect season. The first week of August was when we planned
to set out. On July 30, my wife arranged a farewell party for me at our house. Alex and Katya came, and Boris and Sonya, and our friends Mark, Caroline, and Bill. For the Russians, the evening was an occasion for minor-key histrionics and doom-predicting in their native fashion, along with excitement and hilarity. Katya said how bitterly she blamed herself for leading me into this Russian nightmare in the first place; the next minute she was saying what a great adventure this would be. Boris asked if he could have my car, in the event that I did not return. He added that he was saying this as a precaution only, because I would return, of course. Caroline, who is French-Canadian and observant of style, said she thought it was cheating for me to bring along a satellite phone. That was the only comment I took sort of seriously. What would George Kennan have thought of the satellite phone?

During my last two days, my wife helped a lot, buying hard-to-find travel items, packing the big trunk she found for me, checking off supplies one by one from the list Victor had e-mailed. I had fallen into a half-dazed state and could not have accomplished all that alone. On August 2, as I stood on the front lawn with my heap of stuff waiting for the car service to take it and me to the airport, I looked back at the house and at her and the kids and felt sorry for myself, ridiculously.

Travel, like much else in life, can be more fun to read about than to do. When I’m reading a travel book and the protagonist sets out on a journey and the harbor lights drop behind, I imagine enviously what a grand feeling that must have been. In actual travel situations, however, I’ve noticed that moments of soaring consciousness are rare. Worries and annoyances and trying to remember which pocket the passport is in tend to deromanticize the brain. But on that evening flight to Russia, after wrestling my stuff through customs and clearing security and waiting in the crowded boarding area and filing onto the plane and finding my seat; and after the plane pulled back from the gate and inched onto the runway and inched some more and finally took off, and I saw New York City receding below me and the tiny A train running out the causeway to Far Rockaway, and then we were over the Atlantic as it glittered widely in the orange sunset: At that moment I felt a blast of mental acceleration that would have made me shout with happiness if I’d been alone.

Again the Helsinki airport. Its employees had taken to zipping here and there on those little foot-powered Razor scooters, making the place somehow even more like purgatory. Again St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo International, and the well-known smell, the sparrows in the concourse, the long line at Passport Control. Sergei and Victor were waiting on the other side of the doors beyond the customs officers. Sergei was beaming with excitement; a white point of light shone on his tanned and furrowed brow. They drove me to the city. For a reason I’ve forgotten, I spent that night in a hotel on the Neva just across from the
Aurora
, the Russian navy cruiser whose cannon had announced the beginning of the October Revolution. The Communists had made her into a museum; her guns were still trained on the Hermitage. I had a farewell dinner with Luda at a microbrew restaurant and then came back to the hotel. The room had become stuffy so I opened the high, narrow windows facing the river. Two or three mosquitoes flew in—the advance pickets of a vast, continental army.