The Joneses get sent to Siberia
It was skiffing back from three days in the woods at the southern end of Deadman’s Reach searching for Sean, my buddy, when I got an email from the Fulbright Commission. After finding his floatcoat with the sleeves pulled out, discovering an empty survival suit bag behind a log – completely dry, as if someone had taken the survival suit and slipped it on just above the beach – after finding fleece pants hung from a log, and beginning to believe my strong, good friend had made it – an email. Either I would, or wouldn’t be awarded a Fulbright Scholar grant to write a book on Russian shipwrecked sailors. Sailors who swam hard for shore when their boat washed up on a rock. And here was Sean, on his way to float a boat washed up on the rocks, his own small craft tumbled in the waves. And either he did, or didn’t make it to shore. 1813. 2018.
We spent three days out there trying to find answers. There at the southern end of Deadman’s Reach, a notoriously dangerous five-mile stretch of water. We made camp, in the bow of Goose Cove. Spent days climbing the hills, thrashing through brush, yelling Sean’s name. But nothing. The broad leaves of devil’s club and moss swallowing all sound. Indeed for the 40-mile trip up in our skiffs we cruised the beaches looking. His body, that is. Calling for him. Try repeating the name of a man you both miss and believe is dead over and over, just yell it into the woods. Imagining him walking out from those woods. Seaweed draped over his shoulders, caught in the zipper of his survival suit. As his brother said, if we start a fire he’ll appear, and show us a better way to do it. Once we were in Goose Cove we found objects scattered along the beach, a constellation of unopened beer cans and Chef Boyardee microwaveable beef ravioli cups. Sean’s military sleeping filled with spruce needles and grit. A glove of his I recognized. Following GPS tracks given to us by Sitka Search and Rescue showing where Alaska Troopers had worked, Coast Guard and SARs folks to try and find him. Expecting, at any moment, to come upon him, lips blue, at the base of a tree. Blackened alder branches, a fire long since extinguished by the rain and cold.But nothing. At one point we thought we saw a footprint, but it was impossible to be sure. We found a fire on the beach lit by an MRE, what must have been a Sean move. But that was Search and Rescue, as we later found out. I brought along Tobias Wolff’s Old School to read at night. It made sense to me, this boy in boarding school fighting for attention, for success on the page. Though I made it just a few sentences before falling asleep. Waking in the night to noises I knew were bears prowling about. Cuddling the 30-aught like a teddy bear. The the book got wet. Beyond salvation.
Then on the way back from Deadman’s, crossing Salisbury Sound, in that window of cell service before you hit town, bing. An email. From the Fulbright Commission. It felt weird and wrong and so I didn’t open it. Not until I had greeted Rachel and the kids. Sundrenched and saturated with death, we just stared at each other for about ten seconds. Smiling all goofy.”We are pleased to announce you have been awarded …” We’re moving to Russia. Such an absurd tangle of emotions.
As they seem to say in so many recent newscasts: Here’s what we know so far:
On September 1st we will board an Aeroflot flight to Moscow out of JFK airport in New York City. We will then board a second flight to Irkutsk. The trip will take us more than halfway around the globe.
Irkutsk is a city of 600,000. The capital of Siberia, it has functioned as a haven for Russian intellectuals shipped east to the gulags. As a mentor of mine put it, “You’re actually paying to go there? And you’re taking your family with you?” Fair point.
Irkutsk regularly hits -40 Fahrenheit in the winter. It is two hours from Lake Baikal, which holds twenty percent of the world’s freshwater. Fire-breathing water beasts inhabit its depths. (It is the deepest lake in the world.) Needless to say, many fishing opportunities.
From what I have been able to glean, Irkutsk is a curious blend of concrete Kruschev-era buildings and traditional wooden Siberian structured. Painted shutters and deepset doors.
We have located a pre-school named Kroshkin House. Literally, house of the little people. It’s gonna be sink or swim, girls. Sink or swim.
And that’s, more or less, where the situation stands. I have a Russia tutor named Marina I meet with each morning. She lives in Perm. She has short hair and a kind smile. A self-proclaimed introvert, she knows all the great books, and cruelly asks for summaries of them in Russian. It’s painful for both of us.
But she has been our Virgil so far – she guided us to the incredible Avito.ru website, where you can buy and rent everything from crows and fishing gear to planes and apartments. A brilliant site, an overexcited Craigslist, friendly to serfs and oligarchs alike.
It was on this site we found an apartment we’re excited about, right in the middle of Irkutsk: https://www.avito.ru/irkutsk/kvartiry/3-k_kvartira_130_m_44_et._1116383849. The only problem with the apartment is it’s four flights up, with no lift. And we are bringing the doggy, as of now. Rachel thinks it will keep him young. And apparently if you get a compartment on the railroad he can come along, no problem. The more I look into Russia, the more I realize what a pain in the ass everything in the States is.
Only thing being, we’re so firmly here in town, and happy. Rachel knocking it out of the park at the courts, on the brink of beginning a new chapter now that the great Jude Pate has become judge. The girls doing gymnastics. Tricia, their instructor, says they’re naturals, and of course we take it hook line and sinker like any parents would. (Though in truth Tricia seems excited at the prospect of Russian gymnastics training. We’ve found a gym there too – apparently a Russian gold medal winner was from Irkutsk!)
As far as that goes, Haley is actually very good, but Kiera-Lee is a freak. I mean she’s doing stuff the three year-olds aren’t even thinking about. Like planking on the bar with her legs extended behind her. She’s always been like that, climbing up to the top of the bunk bed before she could walk. Lowering herself to the floor from a bar chair. Haley’s coordinated, but she’s no Jedi. Kiera-Lee — the other day she wanted to play catch with her Dolly, a christmas doll that began her life white and now looks latina with all the love she’s been given. But I swear Keira-Lee was catching that doll without looking at it. She’s very good in space. On the flipside Haley’s speech was way ahead of hers.
But my kid distracts me. We’re going to Russia. Irkutsk, the capital of Siberia, on the edge of Lake Baikal. The Buryat ride for days on horses across it. Some dude took eight days to ice skate across it. And clean as all get-out, from what I’ve read, despite everyone talking about Russians polluting this and Russians polluting that.
It all started with a trip out to the site of a shipwreck. January 9th 1813 when the Neva went up on the rocks just outside of town . 26 Russians spent nearly a month fashioning fish hooks from copper boat spikes. Surviving. I’ll be looking into the Neva and the Russian-American Company, while Rachel will make a deep study of Mah Jong, or learn to knit Afghans. Whatever. She deserves it. She’s been working too hard. We’ve decided to allot ourselves just one small bag and a carry-on, with the idea that we’ll get whatever else we need when we get there. Especially considering the weakness of the Ruble. Things are really, really cheap. Like a fat steak costs a couple bucks. A glass of piva less than a dollar. Or kvass. Apparently a Russian alcoholic drink made from stale wheat bread. Yum.
Meanwhile the Adak is doing great. Like an Australian shepherd that finally has a job. No more gnawing itself in the shadows. I know the tug was built for work and should be towing barges or transporting troops or maybe even an Army marching band. Give things time we might get there. I do believe she has a beating heart, or at least some sort of life force coarsing through her scantlings. Objects charged with an undistilled dose of human love are like that. It’s quantum physics. No surprise she has electrical fires the moment I’m flying above her without stopping in Sitka, Anchorage-Seattle. That happened.
The other day I was standing on the roof of the boat, thinking how I could have been fishing with my daughters, or planting seeds in our garden. On the one hand it made me bitter, this boat asks so much. So much time, always time.
But that logic has very little to do with love. And that’s what I was talking about later in the day, when an Airbnb guest told me it made no sense to take on a project like this. But what happens when those projects choose you? I remember the first night sleeping on the boat, light alternating pressure on my back as the boat rocked back and forth. Thinking, yes. Of course. And look at her now, paying her own way. Happy to be working.
As I grow older I’m becoming more of a believer in something else. Whatever that might be. A few days ago I was trying to write, but instead I was thinking about Sean. If he made it to the beach. And this might sound bleak but I was thinking about where his heart might be. Not in a spiritual sense, but really. Like, his actual heart, at that very moment. The muscle in his chest that shuttled blood to his brain and his feet and his oversized and wildly capable hands. I found myself thinking of him on the sea floor, wondering if salmon fry had found his heart, if they swam through. Or maybe it beat strong on some Costa Rican beach. I didn’t know. That sounds awful but that’s what I was thinking about. As these thoughts moved through me the phone binged and it was an Airbnb reservation from – you guessed it – Sean. And this Sean said, and I quote, “I built a small wooden sailboat a few years back, as well as kayaks more recently and I just enjoy being on the water.” Difficult not to believe some force doesn’t have a very, very good sense of humor, as well as a generous spirit that reaches out when people are hurting, or thinking thoughts that lead nowhere except sadness. As if to say, here I am. And, it’s okay.
Here’s something else that’s been happening. A sound like a constipated cow, or a pig having a tantrum, goes off in our living room for no reason at all. It comes from a puzzle that works magnetically. It puzzles us, but I’ve come to appreciate how it breaks up the day. I’ll miss that. Our apple tree is blooming. It’s a Frankenstein apple tree with four types of apple, one for each branch. Honey crisp and Macintosh and Pink lady and one more I forget. Jay Stelzemueller (who Sean worked for) said we’d get no appless from it. I told him I’d bake him a pie. I’ll miss doing that.
Haley’s been doing great work both driving the boat, and also setting up the chicken coop, planting currants and watering the apple tree and also our blueberries. She’s a good little worker, my lord. She ran the forklift the other day when we were moving the chicken coop. I thought it would be fun with her in the seat, doing the controls, and then she really got into it, booming out, forking down like a champ. She’s so interested in how things work. She wants to know the rules. Kiera-Lee could care less about rules, she just wants to use things in a way that makes sense to her. I think she’s more like me in this way, Haley more like Rachel.
Sean’s sister came to town and Haley got to visit with her. We went fishing, caught nothing. Haley fascinated with the idea that there’s another Ha(i)ley out there. The two girls, sad and beautiful to see them with each other.
On the subject of what we’ll bring to Russia – and I will be blogging about it, I hope to chime in more regularly – they recommend bringing measuring cups so you can keep cooking your favorite recipes. I love that. The comfort of food you know well. We also won’t do it. If it’s going to be kilos in Russia, that’s what we’ll do. Also canvas shopping bags and a plastic egg carrier because eggs are often sold loose. I look forward to sampling the fabled “Russian style of shopping”, a style apparently invented to enable the country to boast full employment. I guess it takes three people to check you out. The recommendation was to just watch what the locals do and copy. I’m imagining people will take such extreme pity on us we’ll have any number of folks trying to usher us through the ordeal of, say, buying eggs.
We also discovered (an extreme amount of microwave popcorn and late-night internetting trying to get some sense of what we are getting ourselves into) that if you acquired your pet in Russia and it is not a pure-bred animal, you will need to acquire a “certificate of worthlessness” showing that you are not taking an animal valued for breeding out of the country. Also if the tax police come knocking on your door, don’t open it (it is generally not a good idea to open your door unless you are expecting a guest), but do let your landlord know about their visit. Also if you are invited to dinner bring flowers, but a bouquet with an odd number of flowers since superstition has it that even-numbered bouquets are for funerals. Duly noted.
We’ve been making notecards and taping them around the house. A stove is a plita. The poor dog has a notecard above his bed. собака. He’s learning Russian too.
Rachel plays Gus on the Go, sending bubbles to capture watermelons and floating dresses and pigs. It’s a game meant for three year-olds. We were using DuoLingo dueling for points but then she cheated and did Spanish and now has like three thousand points to my four hundred in Russian. She’s Sicilian. She plays to win like that.
And that’s about the news. I took a plane up to Haines to cover the clearcut scheduled for up there, which is a load of horseshit courtesy of University of Alaska. The outrage in the community. Was supposed to do some fishing with Karl but it blew up so we didn’t go.
Good buddy Raph Shapiro came into town, and I think my daughter developed her first crush. So sweet. Of course I cleaned my guns during his visit. At his concert she rushed the stage. He told her in the mic she could be thrown out for such things.
Also did one of the Princess cruises, and got the entire family to come along, which was awesome. Great to have sisters and Joe and everyone there, to be able to show them Alaska. Everyone is so harsh on cruises, but they can be wonderful if you play it right. As we launch ourselves into this adventure, I find myself considering over and over again the question of time, and where we choose to spend our time. How we choose to spend it. Because that seems to be the true currency these days. Time. Everyone wanting your attention, your time. The more we can make another peson stare, the better we are graded as humans. The President knows this, thinks he knows this. Actors know this. Millenials seem to understand this so much better than my generation, Generation X I guess that would be. Stories capture attention. Good stories. These days it seems like everyone wants a story of the good and the bad, the superhero battling the foces of evil, triumphing in the end. Whether that evil be “illegals” or Trump or Isis or whatever else.
We just try to raise good kids. Jesus. Try not to beat ourselves up for bringing these small muscles into such a fraught world. Try to make it easy on them, but not too easy. My grandma-in-law kindly questions our journey to Russia, frets about Putin. It’s not safe for the kids. Surely the KGB will track you, bug your apartment. Though it seems that this is just the moment to go, under the aegis of the U.S. State Department. When the kids are young and expectant and not in school. Smiling, their brains so open and the butter and cream and salmon they eat creating the myelin sheathing for the synapses which light up each morning, ready to absorb something new. We’ve shown them photos of the Kroshkin House, along with kids flying kites in Siberia. They’re down. I mean, why not? As Rachel never ceases to tell them, they were born to crazy people. Get over it. I swear, being out on the lawn with Haley, playing ball with her while she’s wearing her Eagles Superbow 52 shirt it’s like, what more really could a guy need? I mean, besides a Pulitzer, that would be cool too.
Anyways, onward. As we prepare for the journey I’ll spend more time recording the trials and tribulations. Rachel thinks Russia is going to invade Alaska and so we’re not going to have to deal with a return visa. We’ll see. Right now anything seems possible.
