Green and grey
Sep. 27th, 2005 10:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
devi(or, the second day at Baikal)
We're walking through the village, bent against icy wind, and Alek is telling us why Siberia wasn't settled by Russians until the 1800s. It's the rivers. They're huge and powerful and they all flow south-north. The easiest way to travel in Siberia was in the winter when the rivers froze, in temperatures so low that exposed fingers and ears can shatter and fall off if struck. This isn't Earth, it's Low Fantasyland.
And it's getting emptier and emptier. Young people are leaving for the cities. There are towns up north where they're going to turn off the gas and electricity in two years' time and move the remaining population out because so few are left. We pass the school, with a monument to local people who died in World War 2, and Alek tells us that its numbers are low because most kids go to boarding school in Irkutsk. I don’t know how to feel. I want places like this, with their wandering cows and their silence, to keep on existing, but if I was a teenager here I would dream every night of cities and the huge shiny world and nothing could persuade me to stay.
We walk up on the fenceless hills above the village where everyone's cows graze in common. There's a Radoxy smell in the air, and we look down and realise our feet are crushing wild lavender and thyme, letting their perfume out. There are funny little mushrooms, yellow and brown, dotting the ground. Out beyond the village the green land stretches without a wall all the way to the lake. There's a weather station out there and a disused sawmill. But by now I'm freezing (Tamara scolded me earlier for not wearing tights, but I'd only brought one pair, not expecting snow) and I own up to my own wussiness and head back while the boys walk on to the church.
Or that's the plan. Halfway down the hill I think idly that it sounds as if all the dogs in the village are barking, then I look round and realise that two great big wolf-things are galloping up the hill towards me in a pincer movement, barking their heads off and snarling. I freeze. They freeze too, snapping their jaws and growling. I take one step towards the village. They lope a few more paces towards me. I stop. We have a stand-off. I keep perfectly still, trying not to smell of fear. I wonder what they do smell along with the normal smell of human – a cocktail of Lush products and Palmer's Cocoa Butter Formula wafting downhill towards them, train-smells on my boots, memories of Dublin and London still clinging to my coat. No wonder they're uneasy. I sit down and wait for them to get bored, and it occurs to me that I'd much rather be trapped up a hill by dogs in Siberia than trapped by worries and bills, obligations and poverty, the grocery shopping and paperwork and rent in London. Dogs are simple. It is people who are scary.
Later on, after another banya and playing with three shy ginger kittens in Gala's farmyard, I walk over to the shop (Magazin Anna) where Ivan is buying Baltika beer for later. (Note for future travellers: the numbers on Baltika beer mean its strength. We'd been drinking Baltika 7 on the train. Do not buy Baltika 0. It's (spit) nonalcoholic. We had to take it back and exchange it.) Two young guys are sitting in the corner, smelling of drink and laughing helplessly – at us? Who knows? Does it matter? Outside they get into a ridiculous car like a Matchbox toy from the 80s, with great big Batmobile spoilers, covered in blue and white airbrushed go-faster stripes. They zoom off up the grassy hill, gunning the engine. Later we see another modified car pulling into a yard near ours. A few minutes later more bangin' Eurotrance starts coming from the house. I try to imagine the scene in the house and wonder if this is the rebellious youth-culture element of the village, if the others like them or wish they’d move to Irkutsk already. Maybe they've tried and can't find work.
The music goes on till some time after 2am, when it stops suddenly in mid-song. Someone respected – I imagine a stony-faced babushka giving them a tongue-lashing – must have walked in. It's not like anyone can call the cops out here. By then I'm standing at the bedroom window, staring at the moon and the clouds above the lake. Like the ripples on the lake the day before, they seem to be moving in different directions, stretching and contracting, shredding and reforming about the moon. Some strange effect of air currents above the lake – all that water which is warmer than the air above it, still holding summer’s heat? I wonder.
Earlier Pablo asked Alek if there were any legends of ghosts or spirits at the lake. He said, flatly, no. I didn't believe him – clearly he just couldn't be arsed to tell us any stories – but I'm thinking, standing at the window, that there's a legend just begging to be made up right there about the Cloud Dancers of Baikal.
Pictures are here, more being added over the next hour or so.
We're walking through the village, bent against icy wind, and Alek is telling us why Siberia wasn't settled by Russians until the 1800s. It's the rivers. They're huge and powerful and they all flow south-north. The easiest way to travel in Siberia was in the winter when the rivers froze, in temperatures so low that exposed fingers and ears can shatter and fall off if struck. This isn't Earth, it's Low Fantasyland.
And it's getting emptier and emptier. Young people are leaving for the cities. There are towns up north where they're going to turn off the gas and electricity in two years' time and move the remaining population out because so few are left. We pass the school, with a monument to local people who died in World War 2, and Alek tells us that its numbers are low because most kids go to boarding school in Irkutsk. I don’t know how to feel. I want places like this, with their wandering cows and their silence, to keep on existing, but if I was a teenager here I would dream every night of cities and the huge shiny world and nothing could persuade me to stay.
We walk up on the fenceless hills above the village where everyone's cows graze in common. There's a Radoxy smell in the air, and we look down and realise our feet are crushing wild lavender and thyme, letting their perfume out. There are funny little mushrooms, yellow and brown, dotting the ground. Out beyond the village the green land stretches without a wall all the way to the lake. There's a weather station out there and a disused sawmill. But by now I'm freezing (Tamara scolded me earlier for not wearing tights, but I'd only brought one pair, not expecting snow) and I own up to my own wussiness and head back while the boys walk on to the church.
Or that's the plan. Halfway down the hill I think idly that it sounds as if all the dogs in the village are barking, then I look round and realise that two great big wolf-things are galloping up the hill towards me in a pincer movement, barking their heads off and snarling. I freeze. They freeze too, snapping their jaws and growling. I take one step towards the village. They lope a few more paces towards me. I stop. We have a stand-off. I keep perfectly still, trying not to smell of fear. I wonder what they do smell along with the normal smell of human – a cocktail of Lush products and Palmer's Cocoa Butter Formula wafting downhill towards them, train-smells on my boots, memories of Dublin and London still clinging to my coat. No wonder they're uneasy. I sit down and wait for them to get bored, and it occurs to me that I'd much rather be trapped up a hill by dogs in Siberia than trapped by worries and bills, obligations and poverty, the grocery shopping and paperwork and rent in London. Dogs are simple. It is people who are scary.
Later on, after another banya and playing with three shy ginger kittens in Gala's farmyard, I walk over to the shop (Magazin Anna) where Ivan is buying Baltika beer for later. (Note for future travellers: the numbers on Baltika beer mean its strength. We'd been drinking Baltika 7 on the train. Do not buy Baltika 0. It's (spit) nonalcoholic. We had to take it back and exchange it.) Two young guys are sitting in the corner, smelling of drink and laughing helplessly – at us? Who knows? Does it matter? Outside they get into a ridiculous car like a Matchbox toy from the 80s, with great big Batmobile spoilers, covered in blue and white airbrushed go-faster stripes. They zoom off up the grassy hill, gunning the engine. Later we see another modified car pulling into a yard near ours. A few minutes later more bangin' Eurotrance starts coming from the house. I try to imagine the scene in the house and wonder if this is the rebellious youth-culture element of the village, if the others like them or wish they’d move to Irkutsk already. Maybe they've tried and can't find work.
The music goes on till some time after 2am, when it stops suddenly in mid-song. Someone respected – I imagine a stony-faced babushka giving them a tongue-lashing – must have walked in. It's not like anyone can call the cops out here. By then I'm standing at the bedroom window, staring at the moon and the clouds above the lake. Like the ripples on the lake the day before, they seem to be moving in different directions, stretching and contracting, shredding and reforming about the moon. Some strange effect of air currents above the lake – all that water which is warmer than the air above it, still holding summer’s heat? I wonder.
Earlier Pablo asked Alek if there were any legends of ghosts or spirits at the lake. He said, flatly, no. I didn't believe him – clearly he just couldn't be arsed to tell us any stories – but I'm thinking, standing at the window, that there's a legend just begging to be made up right there about the Cloud Dancers of Baikal.
Pictures are here, more being added over the next hour or so.
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no subject
Date: 2005-09-27 03:17 pm (UTC)I must disagree though - Big feck-off dogs ARE scarier than groceries... :)
no subject
Date: 2005-09-27 03:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-27 03:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-27 04:32 pm (UTC)Oh God, completely.
And just to say that 1) I'm loving your missives about the trip, and 2) The blue of the sky and the sea in those pictures exactly matches the blue of your hair; it makes you seem as if you're more than part of the scenery.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-28 12:57 am (UTC)Me, too!
no subject
Date: 2005-09-27 04:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-29 05:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-27 04:50 pm (UTC)What's the scoop on the bright windows and fences when most everything else is dull?
no subject
Date: 2005-09-27 05:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-29 05:36 am (UTC)