Siberian Summer Is Green

A young man in an after-hours uniform, shirt untucked, unbuttoned arrived around midnight claiming ‘my’ bed.  I negotiated, offered him money he wouldn’t take it but he kindly took the bunk next door.  I had hoped he might be traveling all the way to Moscow.  About two-and-a-half hours later I discovered he was only on board for a short while.  The train’s cleaning lady had opened the door and was showing a new young man in.  Still half asleep I thought the other man was still in my bed and fumbled for my phone to type out my case. 

Eventually it became clear that the earlier gentleman had departed and I would now need to move rooms  I showed the new gentleman, my pre-typed message:   We are a family traveling to Moscow.  Can I swap 33 for 32 with you?  Thank you.”  He answered me in confident English “I’m sorry but I need to work tomorrow.”  I offered to pay him a few thousand rublles but this didn’t move him.  He did however graciously offer to take the adjoining bed for the night.  It was 2:30AM but suggested he’d need to type at the table in our room, on “my” bed in the morning.  “No problem.  Done.” I quickly confirmed.  I’d just spend the next day back in the dining car.  I secretly imagined he might make friends with the folks next door anyway and he’d be just as happy to type there.  But no matter.  I just wanted to go back to bed, and now, I could. 

“Where are you going to?  Are you heading to Moscow” I asked, hopefully, enjoying the fact that I could suddenly converse without typing.  “I’m going to Omsk, twenty hours from here.”  “I see.”   Back in my cabin I looked up the location of Omsk.  Never heard of it, but I will now, never forget this ridiculous name.” I reckoned as I searched.  To those of you who are uninitiated, twenty hours might seem like a generous amount of time, not to have to worry about a new guest, but we’re on this train for over one-hundred and forty hours.  Twenty hours would mean I’d be confronting this dynamic once again, or at least the possibility of this dynamic, as early as, say 10:30PM Thursday. 

I’ve been so enjoying spending time again with the young Peter Kropotkin, the geologist who heads out into Siberia as cartographer, as an explorer.  I remember being oddly thrilled with this part of the book, the pre-revolutionary section, when I was my older daughter’s age.  And now he’s going in the opposite direction we just took, heading to Irkutsk and to Chita by horseback, by sleigh. We had just trained passed the Usuri River and the Amur River and as I’d vaguely remembered, his descriptions are vivid, urgent.   He describes the rivers as enormous and violent.  We must have passed them at night or did not abut them at all for at that part of the journey all we saw were more modest estuaries.

Outside this morning, it is green.  The Siberian summer is green for as far as one can see.  Yesterday there were more pines.  Today, the birches other deciduous hardwoods are back. Yesterday we passed the fabled Lake Baykal.  From a train it was difficult to contend with the enormity of this body of water that apparently holds a fifth of the world’s fresh water, in its unfathomable depths.  But it was nice to see blue for a change, certainly.  Today, we are back to green. 

Tuesday and Wednesday mornings were overcast and drizzling outside.  Today, Siberia is crisp, and clear.  Wildflowers are mostly yellow and white, occasionally purple.  They are longer weed-like variety than what we saw in the far east.  Every twenty or thirty miles is a modest town.  And any town is the invitation to interrupt whatever else one is doing to go online, for depending on the size of the village, one might get enough mobile data to check an email, consider geo-location.  We are, it appears, about sixty miles from Krasnoyarsk. 

The waiter in the dining car, asked me if I liked Russia. The fastidious, penurious, generous couple in the cabin beside me who are heading to “Tiger?” and the crisp but officious conductor and the hard-working cleaning lady and the proprietors of restaurants. And the staff in shops and the few cab drivers I hired all flashed by as I responded with an emphatic “Yes!”  Slowly, unpacking a lifetime’s worth of prejudice and oversimplification.  Slowly filing in the stereotypes with something substantive.  We’ve a long way to go on this train, on this trip.  I hope my “yes” is as easy to find by the time we depart. 

One thing I am processing is how much of a country they have and how much they have to be proud of.  The size is continental, obviously, in way overwhelms behemoth conceptions of nationhood, like China or the U.S.  Like the U.S. or Canada, one gets the sense of unending tracts of “unspoiled” land.  But like China, one appreciates that the Russian people’s connections to this land are old world connections that go back, at least or a millennium.  I can’t look at the broad open fields without imagining Mongol horseman galloping over them.  These lands were only “conquered” by Russia during the same period that North America is settled, in the seventeenth century, but the Russian consciousness has had to fear the Mongols and contract the plague and negotiation with the Tartars for nearly as long as it’s been settled beyond Kiev. 

Coming up on a town.  It looks like it might be a ten-minute Wi-Fi town.  My wife is awake.  My daughters are turning.  Soon, Ill have to make way for my neighbor and allow him his bed, if he wants it.  Fifty or so more hours to go on this journey.  So glad to be here and to slowly reckon with this continent. 

Thursday 6/28/18