Downhearted, I regarded the scenery behind the drawn-aside curtain. The Orwellian, drab, concrete human containers the Soviets named Khrushchyovkas seemed even drearier behind the veil of the haze. The dense mass of black clouds that covered them did not allow the slightest trace of a sunray to even indicate the location of the sun, which would have just risen beside the imposing cones of the Koryaksky and Avachinsky volcanoes. Only a dispiriting drizzle penetrated the sky’s endless greyness and sprinkled the window. Petropavlovsk resembled the stage of some dystopian tale.
This unknown and mysterious city is the capital—and practically sole urban center—in Kamchatka: a remote peninsula in the Russian Far East that hosts a population half the size of Wyoming in an area larger than Alaska. Two-thirds of all its residents live along the tens-of-miles-long main road that constitutes the capital, while the remaining third is scattered in military bases and rudimentary, mainly fishing and logging, settlements throughout the inhospitable wilderness. The whole region was designated an exclusive military zone during the Cold War; access to it remained strictly forbidden until 1989 for Soviet citizens and until 1991 for aliens.
Add to the historical isolation the geographic one—the hundreds of miles of icy ocean and thousands of miles of roadless tundra that separate the krai from the Siberian hinterland — and you understand we are talking about one of the most inaccessible and sparsely visited places on the planet… a vast, humanless land, defined by interminable black-sanded beaches; adorned by towering, ever-snow-capped volcanoes; and dominated by bears and all sorts of beasts… Of course, I couldn’t wait to leave the city and explore, but the weather…
It’d been a week we were lodging in a friends’ apartment in the center of Yelizovo: an extension of Petropavlovsk. We stayed at a middle-aged couple’s, parents of an ex of my then’s sister. Amiable people, but we weren’t school pals—or, at least, co-drinkers on some epically fun night in an exotic place—to be at such full ease with them. I had begun to feel a little embarrassed by their hospitality, which, day by day, we had extended from the two originally asked to seven-and-we-count nights—especially because they got self-assigned with the task of all-day-long feeding us meat, salmon, caviar, and whatnot. But what could I do? Every morning the same scene…
Alone the alarm clock bespoke each dawn, with little help from the dim natural light. The dust layer thickened atop our piled luggage against the wall. Fog and rain lingered with persistent melancholy outside of the window.
With dwindling hope, I every morning called the headquarters of Kurile Lake National Park to always receive the same dejecting response: “The weather conditions do not permit the helicopter to take off. We’ll see tomorrow.”
Today’s weather was worse than each of the preceding tomorrows. I decided to not even bother to call, but they took me unawares by calling me instead… Supplies were urgently needed at the national park station. They had to transport them over land. They had reserved seats for us, too, and requested that we come to the office immediately.
Initially, I received the tidings with mixed feelings. Sure, I was excited about the imminent departure. But I had also warmed up to the idea of the helicopter ride. And the non-realization of it depressed my enthusiasm somewhat. But as I weighed the matter over a little, I was reanimated. After all, we would probably fly back anyway.
Until this very moment, I believed that covering the two hundred straight kilometers to the lake was not even possible in a wheeled vehicle — and that because there was no road. How this undertaking was going to be carried out, besides baffling me, filled me with fervent anticipation of an awesome adventure. Today I was going to categorically realize that, in a country where road construction is uneconomical, the production of superlative off-road vehicles becomes imperative.
Its monstrous mud-tire wheels reached my waist, and its ground tolerance just a little lower. A three-step ladder led into the interior of its armored container, which was already crammed with numerous cardboard boxes and sacks of provisions. After we also loaded our own baggage, there was just enough room left for the two of us, two more volunteers, and three ranger students, seven passengers in all, to squeeze ourselves onto the two wooden benches that were attached on each side of the crate. The whole lading evoked memories of African buses — only the hens and goats were missing.
The indigenous Koryak driver and his accompanying son-in-law, who heretofore smoked non-stop and nonchalantly close by, then rushed into the truck cabin. With a booming roar and vibration, the powerful engine revved up before we hit the road, half past eight in the morning.
The first part of the route was relatively easy to drive. There was a road, even if the total surface of the asphalt marginally exceeded that of the potholes. We passed a few sparse villages, made a couple of stops for tea, cigarettes, and pirogi, and met the peninsula’s west coast.
There we turned south and found ourselves traveling along a muddy road on a narrow strip of land—forty kilometers long and ranging from fifty to five hundred meters wide—betwixt Protoka River and the Sea of Okhotsk. Except for a seemingly abandoned town — a striking example of Soviet decay — we saw nothing but grey oceanic horizon and a boundless black beach, bestrewn with rotten shipwrecks and swooped-down-on by stout gulls, decomposing whale carrions.
Our advancement was obstructed before the water at the river’s mouth. On the opposite bank, some hundred yards away, a barge was moored; in sooth, a floating platform fixed onto a rickety motorboat. The oxidized container that was the ferry station looked deserted and haunted. The skipper must have fallen asleep inside. It took some shouting and waiting until he emerged, bleary-eyed and half-dressed, out of the door and set about to, slowly and wearily, crank the vessel’s engine.
On the other side, all traces of both civilization and road died off. Only bears could be seen outside the window, roaming solitarily through the unending tundra as our lorry bounced jerkily over the strained suspensions. There I slightly injured my elbows and fingers — but that was better than banging my head unprotected. Objects flew freely across the container’s dimensions, and egg yolks dribbled from various surfaces.
The land ended again near the confluence of Goligino and Opala rivers, shortly before they jointly flowed out into the sea. While we waited for the improvised ferry, we had the opportunity to gaze at a few seals. They languidly drifted down the riverine surface, briefly popping out their mustached muzzles to marvel at the complex beauty of the atmospheric world and inhale its vital oxygen before diving anew into the obscurity of their aquatic netherworld.
We boarded and followed the Opala downstream before taking the Goligino upstream. In the meantime, we wondered at the various colonies the innumerable seals had established on the scattered skerries. Only a few swam around ponderously. Most were probably done with the day’s hunt and were now digesting, lying listlessly on the rocks. Eagle-sized gulls swirled frantically above them, now and then interrupting the calm with piercing squeals.
We disembarked and took the road. After many more miles of bumpy driving and another river crossing, at the time we would have watched a beautiful sunset if anything was visible behind the clouds, we reached the Ozornaya River.
This time we didn’t cross but followed the north bank eastward for thirty kilometers, where our motorized progression was halted by two rangers who waited for our arrival to inform us that the route further had been rendered impassable by recent storms.
Aided by the terminal twilight, we unloaded all the cargo and stacked it by the riverbank. In slight contrast to the dim surface, the silhouette of a dinghy appeared around the next bend, quietly gliding down the stream towards us. We transloaded what fitted into it. It turned around and left buzzing against the current and the darkness. We shouldered what didn’t fit and began striding the remaining ten miles to the lake.
With torches aimed mostly at the ground, so to locate the shallowest mud, we slowly ate into the distance. The way was long and tough but truly delightful.
For the first time in days, the sky cleared majestically. Contours of imposing mountains and volcanoes were delineated at its borders. The Milky Way glowed in its midst with the intensity it does when the nearest source of artificial light is hundreds of miles away. Bears’ eyes glistened within the reach of our torch beams momentarily before running off, terrified by our boisterous march.
Wild, cold midnight, we arrived at the pitch-dark ranger station of Kurile Lake National Park.
This consisted of a cluster of huts, a makeshift helipad, and a small pier on the shore of Istok Bay, on the lake’s west side. The most well-kept of these huts functioned as a kitchen, dining room, and gathering place. There we assembled in the presence of the chief. He summarized our upcoming daily routine while we dined on butter bread, fish soup, caviar, and salmon.
After the meal, he led us to the most neglected of the huts, which contained our bunks. All the others, exhausted, crashed out on the spot. I went out again to immerse myself in the nocturnal natural grace. I wandered down to the porch in front of the kitchen, which was the only place where smoking was allowed, and there I met that chap whose name I don’t remember. And it’s a pity I forgot it because he was cool and we got along neatly.
His vigor did not reveal that he was in his seventies. His white and thick horseshoe mustache à la Hulk Hogan made me suspect that he used to be in the army, before he told me by himself. As soon as he retired, he left his family in Moscow and retreated to this end of the world, where he now worked as the station’s janitor and lived peacefully through his senility.
After we finished smoking, tapping his neck meaningfully with a finger (as the famous Russian gesture goes), he invited me to his room, right behind the kitchen. That’s where the box with the vodkas and the samogonkas that we brought earlier with the truck had ended up. The Koryak and his son-in-law were there, too. The three of them had already emptied half the bottles. Until almost morning, we depleted the rest together. It is unclear whether we saved two for tomorrow.
I had hardly slumbered for three hours when mighty light invaded through the sole window into the dormitory. All the others were still comatose, and one snored like a jackhammer. I dressed and went out to see what was going on.
An all-blue sky domed the glass-flat surface of the lake. Mist wisps slid gently along the green slopes around its periphery. Snow residues shimmered high up on the nearly perfect cone of the Ilinsky Volcano that dominated the landscape. A mother bear sauntered leisurely down by the shore, seemingly rejoicing in the rustleless sunshine, followed by her three tottering cubs.
As for people, only the cook was awake before me, lazily preparing breakfast with a vintage cassette player crooning old Russian songs. The others—bar the janitor and the Koryak who did not show up until late in the afternoon—got up one by one. And thus began a beautiful day at Kurile Lake; the first of about thirty I was to spend in this oneiric place.
The chief and five or six more rangers; the janitor, the cook, three Ukrainian builders, and about as many various other workers; three or four scientists; some ten apprentice rangers; six or seven volunteers; the odd person… one goes, one comes… an average of thirty-to-forty souls lived at the station.
Among the volunteers, I was the only male. Apparently, the chief was actively involved in the selection process. He had arranged for the girls’ dormitory to be placed in the command post hut, a floor below his bedroom, and was trying hard to break the abstinence. In their turn, the rangers were struggling to find a good excuse or win a girl’s favor that would permit entry to the dorm. I had the freest access of all due to the then.
The girls were helping out the cook. They would peel a few potatoes and, for the most part, sunbathe on the porch, gloating over the incessant advances of the abstainers. I worked either with the Ukrainians, building a nice kiosk outside the station, or with the janitor, cutting wood, mowing the lawn, clearing paths, and such things during breaks from drinking tea and chilling. Every time the Koryak came with the truck, we had the next day strictly off.
We had tourists, too. It was dead of summer, and weather permitting, we’d get a helicopter or two per day, maybe up to ten on weekends. They would stay there for a few hours and pay from seven hundred to several thousand dollars. Only once did we have a group of ten to fifteen Japanese photographers — carrying telescopic lenses reminiscent of NASA satellite instruments — who spent five days camping in the national park. Buddha knows what they paid.
Nine out of ten tourists were Russians; the rest were Asians. Only one time I remember seeing Europeans, a Swiss couple. Generally, I had no truck with the lot of them. Even the Russians, whose language I understand, were mostly snobby moneybags not to be talked to. A chat — even if not in the sense of a mutually intelligible one — I had only once with a drunk Chinese man.
I was spouting whatever random Mandarin came to my head, and he was telling me his stuff. He was amazed to see me rolling my own fags. I made one for him, and he gave me some of his luxurious Chinese ones—I knew they cost about thirty dollars a pack because I had bought them by mistake when I was new in China, still getting used to the exchange rates… I go for the first time to buy cigarettes and show for a sample a pack given to me by a Chinese girl who did not smoke and had found it somewhere. When I did the calculations, some twenty steps down the pavement, I turned back and kicked up a fuss because I thought he ripped me off. Anyway…
So… The tourists came there mainly to see bears. We are talking about a lot of bears. On the first day of my stay at the station alone, I saw more of them than I had previously seen in my entire life.
Around three hundred brown bears live around the perimeter of the lake. They had then recently woken up from hibernation and were still in energy-saving mode. They spend the first phase of the season nibbling on leaves and fruits during breaks from snoozing in the sunshine.
Sometime in August, the great feast begins. Dense binds of salmon from all over the Pacific inundate the rivers of Kamchatka, toiling relentlessly against the currents to reach the lake and spawn. The bears rush to the shores, engaging in spectacular fights for the best fishing posts, and operating their claws and teeth day and night, they forever erase the unluckiest fish’s chromosomes from the gene pool.
One may wonder: Why don’t they also eat a bit of human since so many of them hang around? Because, unlike their polar cousins, they have not included primates in their diet. Generations of coexistence with the dominant species have taught them that it’s not worth the risk.
However, it remains true that an unarmed adult man is to her the kind of opponent a big hare is to the adult man. Weighing up to six hundred kilograms, if she’d only charge at you, it’d feel like being swiped by a city car. Half your weight in muscles of a single sharp-clawed arm, her slapping you must feel like a champion hammer thrower smacks a rake on your face with the torque of a flagpole. Let’s not talk about biting.
You mutually want a distance to separate you. In most cases, she will notice you first by a long shot and will readily edge away. Trouble happens if you cross paths asudden…
In noisy conditions, such as by the river or in strong winds, it is wise to declare your presence with a whistle or by singing — but do not overdo it because you will get on your companions’ nerves.
If the bad break occurs and you confront her startled in front of you, the worst thing you can do is run (unless the ground is steep, in which case you take to your heels downhill where she can’t chase you lest she tumbles). In the primitive ecosystem, size counts more than anything else. If you are in company, huddle together; if in pair, piggyback the lighter one. She’ll judge that you’re out of her league.
If you are solo and she’s exhibiting aggression, back up slowly and calmly, always facing her, simultaneously speaking to her nicely, and if necessary, combatively. Finally, in the extremely unlikely and unlucky case that she attacks… if you have a gun or firecrackers, shoot in the air; if you have nothing, fall prostrate, lock your arms behind your neck—hopefully, you’ll be also wearing a backpack to protect your spine—feign a corpse… and you should get away with a slashed hip or thigh.
It goes without saying that at the station, we took every possible precautionary measure. The area was enclosed by an electric fence, albeit it didn’t inspire absolute confidence.
It was basically made of two wires attached to sparse, pegged plastic poles of a toy tent’s durability. The upper one reached the top of my shanks, and the voltage — which I often happened to test by mistake or on purpose — would not daunt me was I to collect in dollars the evaluative equivalent of a bear’s meal; just like, after all, they weren’t daunted either, often barging in at night on foraging expeditions on our leftovers — usually on the day after the Koryak’s arrival when we didn’t burn the garbage on our day off — and so they forced us — apart from gathering and incinerating a two days’ worth of torn and scattered waste — to repair the fence, too.
Outside the station, as a rule, we had to be armed and in groups of at least two. Of course, this regulation was not observed to the letter — particularly after the arrival of a new chief who was even less preoccupied with safety and even more with the female volunteers than his predecessor — but all was mostly alright; there wasn’t a serious danger issue.
Statistically, the threat was astronomically improbable. There had been no fatal accident since the 1980s. And then it was a crazy Japanese outdoorsy photographer, who wandered alone for months with his tent around the woods and the tundra, taking increasing liberties with the bears and invading their privacy… How much of a paparazzo can a bear endure? Coincidentally, the next accident happened just a few days after I left…
But let me diverge here a bit to recount a nice one I saw on YouTube just before I went to Kamchatka… There were two Argentine fishermen documenting their trip to the peninsula. Not only did they steal the bears’ fish, but they, too, like that Japanese dude, pushed their luck with the cameras… They record one night in the darkness of their tent, and they narrate how they got assailed by a bear, and they are now missing glutes and stuff… But what I recall the most is what they did in the hotel in Petropavlovsk after their recovery. They were cooking with a gas stove on the floor and burned a hole in the carpet. They then cut a square around it and replaced it with another equal-sized one cut from under the nightstand… Traveling requires ingenuity.
Back to Kurile Lake, I was more concerned about the mosquitoes. If I made the mistake to go out at dusk without gloves and a net hat, I was afraid I would scratch myself to the bone. The only time I shat myself was during an afternoon I was mowing the lawn. A ranger student sat close by and shot in the air accidentally while he was cleaning his rifle barrel. It was good he didn’t look inside to see what he cleaned.
So were my days and nights passing by… a little work; chilling on the porch and in the girls’ dorm; walking around; some chess with that one ranger from Saint Petersburg; dips in the lake with whomever else dared the temperature; music evenings around the fire in the kiosk under the supervision of a bust of Lenin; boozing with the janitor, the Koryak, his son-in-law, and that Moscovite law student whose winding up there was a prize from some kind of contest; and a lot of nosh…
We ate quantitatively well; only the variety was somewhat missing. I had grown weary of salmon and caviar—okay, bread and potatoes too, which we had to ration thriftily. You eat what’s available… And fishing there hardly required any more skill than picking pebbles. You cast and pulled.
We were practically isolated from the outside world. A small satellite dish was installed by the command post, but that barely sufficed for correspondence with the national park headquarters in the city. It was supposed to transmit Wi-Fi as well, but its bandwidth wasn’t significantly more adequate than the telecommunications of the pre-telegraphic era. With a little luck, it would load a text message in half an hour if you tried late at night when everyone was asleep. During the day, the area around the hut was constantly frequented by desperate folks, who vainly and irrationally — like the gambler over the roulette wheel — awaited, gazes sunk into the screen, in case it broadcast any news from Instagram or Vkontakte. So I didn’t bother, and I experienced my longest abstention from the Internet ever since the time I was in Cuba.
We also went on several excursions away from Istok Bay. My desire since the moment I set foot there was to climb Ilyinsky Volcano… but neither did I manage to persuade anyone to form a team, nor to persuade the chief to give me a ride on the speedboat across the lake to the foot of the volcano at dawn and come to pick me up again by dusk — which was the only way that rendered the climb possible without an overnight.
Alternatively, we made small groups and went on various shorter hikes… to the Boats of the Native God Kutkhu, which were geological formations of volcanic pumice similar to the towers of Cappadocia; to the lush Domestic Hill, whence we marveled at some fabulous views of the lake and its surroundings; to the Northern Bay, which was precisely what its name suggests and was defined by a lovely pebble beach… And we also often cruised to Etamynk Bay, whose name I have no idea what it means, but maintained a secluded, secondary ranger station with three or four souls manning it next to the Khakytsin River’s estuary, a favorite fishing post of the bears.
The days passed, and on a clear afternoon, we boarded the helicopter for Petropavlovsk. Kamchatka’s natural glamor stretched majestically below us during the flight. Four people from the station, we lodged in a ranger’s apartment that he so generously granted us access to. We stayed there for three days until we were ready for the big trekking adventure we had planned in the meantime. Upon returning to civilization, a dozen days later, we received the sad news from Kurile Lake…
It was about a young ranger student. He left the base alone and unarmed to go fetch a bag a tourist had forgotten. He apparently followed the riverbank and passed by a bear’s fish stash. It took a few days for his body to be found… What to do… These things happen.
But to not conclude the narrative in such a macabre manner, let’s say something merrier… What to say… Beautiful and wild Kamchatka… a strange place as Viktor Tsoi’s song goes.
