This is a continuation of the last entry, Universal Symbols; I'm making an attempt to construct a real story with a real three-part plot &c &c out of one of these snippets. Please bear with me while I flail.
It would have been 34 hours from San Francisco to Yakutsk, had the flight from Harbin actually left the ground; instead, it was another 24 hours in Quingdao before I could go on. Astonishingly, although I didn’t have a visa for China, nobody seemed to give a shit if I wandered out of the airport, so I ended up having a fun little one-day mini-vacation in Quingdao.
Everybody I have talked to tells me that this couldn’t possibly have happened and that it doesn’t match their experience of China’s customs practice and whatnot, but there you go. I think it bears on this story not at all, except that I had a surprisingly great day, and I bought a coat more appropriate to Siberia than anything I had in my closet in California.
Yakutsk is bleak. I was arriving in late May, the temperatures ranged from freezing to damn-it’s-cold, and the locals were all walking around in shorts and t-shirts because it was warm. The city is designed around cold weather survival, and if it looks sort of weird in spring, it’s because everybody is used to there being mounds of snow everywhere.
It’s got this shitty-midwestern-rustbelt thing going on, like a lot of Russian cities, as though the style and general maintenance habits of the South ended up applied to a Midwestern city. A guy called Timofey (“Teem”) met me at the airport with a shitty rusted-out Toyota Camry, literally the same year my parents drove when I was a kid. Apparently they survive the winter in Yakutsk as well as they survive Southern California summers.
We drove south for something like eight hours; it probably would have been less if Teem hadn’t insisted on stopping for snacks and whatnot at literally every little roadside stand; after a while, watching him watch his watch, I realized that he was keeping some sort of schedule; a lot of conversation later, it turned out that he had the idea that Americans want to stop and look at everything, all the time, so he’d planned an itinerary that allowed us to stop for ten or fifteen minutes every hour and still make it in time.
I argued with him about it, but it turns out that this feature is something that Teem likes about Americans, so he found it disheartening when I made him drive through his carefully planned breaks; we finally compromised on stopping every other hour.
The camp was more fortified than I was expecting; but then, I’d never been to an archaeological dig in real life, and honestly my mental image was all about tents in a desert, and that image had persisted even as we drove through hour after hour of sub-arctic forest, so when the cabins came into view I wasn’t seeing them as our destination; I was still looking for the desert.
Jack was standing out in the big gravel parking-lot, which also functioned as the terminus of the road we were on. We’d left the main highway -- a two-lane stretch of potholes and unfinished roadwork that Teem had assured me was the main artery for this entire region, which was apparently the size of three or four midwestern states.
I climbed out of the Camry -- which I would have said was more or less precisely the wrong car for this kind of trip, this kind of terrain, but had been fine -- and stretched a bit; I wasn’t as stiff as I might have been, if we hadn’t been stopping every hour.
Jack stomped up with his big shit-eating grin, his hand out, and when I stuck my hand in it used it to pull me in for a big bear-hug, with back-slapping and the whole bit.
We went back into the common cabin, spent a while talking; tea came out, and some sort of cake. Some sort of international tradition of smalltalk meant that we couldn’t get right down to business; I was introduced to everyone -- the two other Anthropologists on Jack’s team, a Chinese-American guy called Henry and a French-Algerian woman named something that ended with a gargling sound I couldn’t make, and which provoked laughter when I tried, but whom I was encouraged to call Em.
There were also a collection of Russians; some basically laborers, some I recognized as technical specialists of various types; Boris, whom I immediately pegged as the keeping-everybody-in-line kind of middle manager; and Ivan, who was the troubleshooting kind of middle manager.
It turned out that we’d arrived too late to go up to the cave tonight; it would be dark soon, and nobody wanted to go tramping around in the dark; so the tea gave way to vodka, and then it was one of those nights of story-telling and awkward social catharsis that often accompanies the arrival of a new person in a small community.
I was pretty fuzzed pretty quickly, because it’s a mistake for a Californian to try to keep pace with Russians when the vodka is flowing, and ended up sitting in the corner, smiling the vague smile of the drunk, displaced, and exhausted; the last thing I remember before I fell asleep on the couch was Jack, sitting across from me, reaching over and slapping my knee, telling me how good it was to see me, and how sorry he was to have wasted my time.
“What do you mean?” I think I tried to say, mostly coming out as mumbles. My expression of befuddlement must have conveyed it though.
“It doesn’t work,” he said. “We tried it, yesterday. Nothing. It lights up green, but then nothing happens. It lights up green no matter what you do to the pad, and then it doesn’t do anything.”
I stared at him, drunkenly dismayed. Not only had he tried without me, not only didn’t it work, but... but if there was some sort of, of limit on the number of tries...
“Well,” I said, “We’ll just have a look, huh?” Or at least, I meant to; I’m pretty sure the last part came out as snores.
It would have been 34 hours from San Francisco to Yakutsk, had the flight from Harbin actually left the ground; instead, it was another 24 hours in Quingdao before I could go on. Astonishingly, although I didn’t have a visa for China, nobody seemed to give a shit if I wandered out of the airport, so I ended up having a fun little one-day mini-vacation in Quingdao.
Everybody I have talked to tells me that this couldn’t possibly have happened and that it doesn’t match their experience of China’s customs practice and whatnot, but there you go. I think it bears on this story not at all, except that I had a surprisingly great day, and I bought a coat more appropriate to Siberia than anything I had in my closet in California.
Yakutsk is bleak. I was arriving in late May, the temperatures ranged from freezing to damn-it’s-cold, and the locals were all walking around in shorts and t-shirts because it was warm. The city is designed around cold weather survival, and if it looks sort of weird in spring, it’s because everybody is used to there being mounds of snow everywhere.
It’s got this shitty-midwestern-rustbelt thing going on, like a lot of Russian cities, as though the style and general maintenance habits of the South ended up applied to a Midwestern city. A guy called Timofey (“Teem”) met me at the airport with a shitty rusted-out Toyota Camry, literally the same year my parents drove when I was a kid. Apparently they survive the winter in Yakutsk as well as they survive Southern California summers.
We drove south for something like eight hours; it probably would have been less if Teem hadn’t insisted on stopping for snacks and whatnot at literally every little roadside stand; after a while, watching him watch his watch, I realized that he was keeping some sort of schedule; a lot of conversation later, it turned out that he had the idea that Americans want to stop and look at everything, all the time, so he’d planned an itinerary that allowed us to stop for ten or fifteen minutes every hour and still make it in time.
I argued with him about it, but it turns out that this feature is something that Teem likes about Americans, so he found it disheartening when I made him drive through his carefully planned breaks; we finally compromised on stopping every other hour.
The camp was more fortified than I was expecting; but then, I’d never been to an archaeological dig in real life, and honestly my mental image was all about tents in a desert, and that image had persisted even as we drove through hour after hour of sub-arctic forest, so when the cabins came into view I wasn’t seeing them as our destination; I was still looking for the desert.
Jack was standing out in the big gravel parking-lot, which also functioned as the terminus of the road we were on. We’d left the main highway -- a two-lane stretch of potholes and unfinished roadwork that Teem had assured me was the main artery for this entire region, which was apparently the size of three or four midwestern states.
I climbed out of the Camry -- which I would have said was more or less precisely the wrong car for this kind of trip, this kind of terrain, but had been fine -- and stretched a bit; I wasn’t as stiff as I might have been, if we hadn’t been stopping every hour.
Jack stomped up with his big shit-eating grin, his hand out, and when I stuck my hand in it used it to pull me in for a big bear-hug, with back-slapping and the whole bit.
We went back into the common cabin, spent a while talking; tea came out, and some sort of cake. Some sort of international tradition of smalltalk meant that we couldn’t get right down to business; I was introduced to everyone -- the two other Anthropologists on Jack’s team, a Chinese-American guy called Henry and a French-Algerian woman named something that ended with a gargling sound I couldn’t make, and which provoked laughter when I tried, but whom I was encouraged to call Em.
There were also a collection of Russians; some basically laborers, some I recognized as technical specialists of various types; Boris, whom I immediately pegged as the keeping-everybody-in-line kind of middle manager; and Ivan, who was the troubleshooting kind of middle manager.
It turned out that we’d arrived too late to go up to the cave tonight; it would be dark soon, and nobody wanted to go tramping around in the dark; so the tea gave way to vodka, and then it was one of those nights of story-telling and awkward social catharsis that often accompanies the arrival of a new person in a small community.
I was pretty fuzzed pretty quickly, because it’s a mistake for a Californian to try to keep pace with Russians when the vodka is flowing, and ended up sitting in the corner, smiling the vague smile of the drunk, displaced, and exhausted; the last thing I remember before I fell asleep on the couch was Jack, sitting across from me, reaching over and slapping my knee, telling me how good it was to see me, and how sorry he was to have wasted my time.
“What do you mean?” I think I tried to say, mostly coming out as mumbles. My expression of befuddlement must have conveyed it though.
“It doesn’t work,” he said. “We tried it, yesterday. Nothing. It lights up green, but then nothing happens. It lights up green no matter what you do to the pad, and then it doesn’t do anything.”
I stared at him, drunkenly dismayed. Not only had he tried without me, not only didn’t it work, but... but if there was some sort of, of limit on the number of tries...
“Well,” I said, “We’ll just have a look, huh?” Or at least, I meant to; I’m pretty sure the last part came out as snores.
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