Riding the Iron Rooster

But I wanted to reveal myself and tell them that this train was much better than the one I had taken in 1973. It was more orderly, and cleaner, and seemingly more tolerant. What I remembered was that the dining car had run out of decent food after a few days, and we had lived on eggs and watery soup and stale bread; and I had a very clear memory of the thin soup sloshing in the steel soup bowls as the train jolted around long curves.

Clouds were massing and building towards the dazzling white moon just before I turned in. It had grown cold. In the immensity of the Siberian forest, amid the blue pools of snow and spiky trees, there were wolves and wild dogs—farther on I saw their skins being stretched on frames. It seemed to me hateful that they should make wolves into hats. When the moon was lost in the cloud cover, a blackness overwhelmed the view. I awoke at Taishet the next morning to driving snow.

It was spring snow—sudden, heavy and deep. The whole landscape was buried in it, with only a few brown muddy creeks showing through—no water, just a creek shape of chocolate ice cream straggling through the snow. The strange silence and isolation that snow brings to a place was intensified here in Siberia—or technically Eastern Siberia, as it said in Russian on the sign at the little wooden station at Uk. It snowed all day, and at times, as the train rolled through it, the snow was so thick that everything was white—the sky, the earth: nothing but a blankness with a few faint tracings of trees.

I had Rick Westbetter's word that the wooden townships looked like small towns in the Midwest in the 1920s—one-story wooden houses with steeply pitched roofs; and outside town a couple of filthy factories whose smoke was the same browny-gray as the clouds, and all around an expanse of prairie—in this case the great Gromboolian Plain of the steppes. Those places a few hours out of Zima all looked like Gopher Prairie. I was now reading Main Street and marveling at the similarity: the boom town in the middle of nowhere.

The snowstorm lessened in the afternoon, and later as we approached Angarsk what looked like a blizzard was the wind whipping the snow from the ground; it had stopped falling. Where the ground had been scoured by the wind, the soil was light brown and dry, the sort of frozen ground you can stub your toe against. It was not until I saw a falcon roosting on a bare tree that I realized that there was little sign of life here—just bare ground and drifted snow under an iron-dark sky. The train raced along, and I looked for more. I thought I saw magpies and crows, but it might have been a trick of the light.

We arrived at Irkutsk, after four and a half days of the Trans-Siberian's crossing the vastness of the steppes. The astonishing thing is not that it took so long to get there, but that for anyone who chooses to go on to Vladivostok, there are four more days of it, and they are much the same. It was like crossing an ocean.

It was nine o'clock at night when we arrived at Irkutsk, but we did not stay in the city. We were directed to a bus and driven to a hotel forty miles away on the shore of Lake Baikal. The Wittricks called it Lake Bacall, like the actress.

The lake was frozen solid, with great shoved-up ice slabs at the shore, because of the pressure. Baikal is the largest lake in the world—it contains one-fifth of the earth's fresh water, and the Russians suggest that there are monsters in it as well as fat seals and numerous varieties of fish. The ice is two meters thick, they boasted. You can walk the length of it—over 400 miles. Or take a sleigh across to Babushkin, which they do to save time in winter. They had amazing things here at Baikal. Natural wonders! Over at Bashaiyarischka they had fur farms—they raised ermine and lynx and mink, and made them into hats. They trapped sable—the little devils wouldn't breed in captivity, but there were plenty of them around and they fetched $1000 a pelt. They had coral in the lake, they boasted. And just down the shore at Listvianka they had a church. There was a priest in the church—a real one.