The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

Our Pushkin Troop, named in honor of the poet, decided to go hiking in the mountains after summer camp was over. The so-called “camp” did not provide us with hardship and adventure. The desire to be active in nature in the way that Baden-Powell would later recommend, but in our own simpler, Russian way, had been in us long before the appearance of the Boy Scouts. Our Pushkin Troop had rules of honor and friendship which were strictly followed even though they were not written. There was also the hope of being helpful to our country and countrymen. Our group was morally different from our environment.

We studied a map of the Caucasus Mountains for a long time and finally chose the itinerary which I had suggested. Suram–Kutaisi– Abastuman–Borzhomi. Because Suram and Borzhomi were very close to each other, the route resembled a triangle with legs of 70 kilometers.

It was a wonderful plan. We would see the famous Suram tunnel, the manganese mines at Chiatur, ancient monasteries, and cross the wild, desolate

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Chapter Four

pass at Zekar. It felt good to plan the hike and from that point even the camp took on more meaning. I recall that I had taken from home a bar of bird-cherry scented soap. It was cheap, but its aroma seemed heavenly and inspiring when it mingled with the morning scent of pines which were all around us.

It did seem to me that the last summer in Tbilisi ought to be spent with my parents. But even my parents agreed that we had to bid a proper farewell to the magnificent Caucasus which had sheltered us for the past twelve years.

We had parceled out our provisions and equipment among the hikers. Finally the awaited day came, and we were all seated in the coach of the evening train. We somehow managed to sleep on the hard benches and in the morning got off at Suram where we found a faucet and washed out in the open. Then we bought chureks of bread and set off westward along the railroad right-of-way. The railroad dove into the darkness of the tunnel but we followed the old abandoned line over the mountains. We stopped to light a campfire and make tea. I was overwhelmed by a mass of new impressions. We continued along the railroad ties thinking of the people who rode past that very spot in comfort. How diverse they must have been: some pleased and happy, others bored and lonely, but none of them seeing the beauty of the mountains beyond the railroad cars. All kinds of thoughts come when you hike along the ties.

We spent the nights around a campfire underneath a clear sky. When it was my turn to cook, I poured buckwheat groats into a pot of water, added salt, diced some smoked Ukrainian fatback and cooked everything over the fire. Before eating we added chopped onion and pepper. I was proud of my glorious Ukrainian mulligan stew. The boys even sang a Ukrainian song in my honor. We would take turns standing watch at night passing a revolver to each other. That was our only weapon. For the sake of security, we invented a story to tell inquisitive natives that we were the vanguard of a large body of troops which followed behind.

In Kutaisi we rested at the home of one of the hikers whose name was Gorokh. We visited very ancient Georgian monasteries. In one of them we were shown the extraordinarily large ring of [the Georgian] King David. There were stone walls clinging to cliffs over abysses and, as elsewhere in the southern Caucasus, palaces of Queen Tamara. In Kutaisi we counted up our money and decided to ride to Kobulety to see the Black Sea. It was a perfectly understandable desire: none of us had ever seen the sea.

We sensed its close presence later in the evening twilight as we strode on deep gravel smelling the sea, breathing it, hearing it, but not seeing it. And we could not see it for a long time until we came right up to it and even then could not discern it nor understand that the foam and the rush was the Black

Oleg Pantiukhov, A Student’s Summer

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Sea itself. In the darkness, the noise, the rumbling and surging, we could not tell where the sea began or ended, especially since we stood at a decent distance trying to keep our hiking boots dry.

Razgil’daev’s relatives, with their constant banal chatter, also kept us from fathoming the sea. It was especially pointless since we could not hear what they were saying anyway. The gravel, churned by waves, made much noise. The moment it piled up in one place, some angry being would gather it all up and fling it back. And each time it was several wagon loads of well-washed multicolored stones.

We slowly got our bearings in this muddle and began to distinguish the pattern by which the azure-green, glassy water would gather into a wave, rise higher and higher and explode in watery fireworks. One could easily “get high” on this. Our new acquaintances, Razgil’daev’s relatives, had to understand why we did not answer their questions and stood staring into the grayish-green mist.