Artic wanderings

Hi all,

I have returned from my short tour of the great white north, and am here to report that things went well. Too well. It was strange, but NOTHING really horrid happened. I guess, if you are going to have a trip with no really bad things going on, a sledride away from the north pole is a good place to have smooth sailing.

We went to the train station, found my train, and got me settled in. My companions were a couple of old Russian guys, one of them a mathematician, and the other a geologist, specializing in nickel. Man, was I glad to not know the language!! Can you imagine being trapped with these two exciting creatures for a long journey? Sort of makes Chaucers group sound fun.

I did take along a couple of friends for those long, lonely hours on the trip. I had Mary Shelley with me, and I took along Henry David Thoreau.

I had never wanted to read Thoreau, and thought that maybe, just maybe, being stuck in 22 hours a day of darkness, with temperatures capable of freeze-drying a person, on a train with a bunch of normally stoic people who I couldn’t understand in the rare chance that they WOULD speak would make ole Hank fun to read.

I read Frankenstein first. On page one, one of the first things the book says is, St. Petersburg, Russia… I thought that was an omen of an interesting type.

To all of you out there avoiding reading Thoreau because you imagine him to be boring, stuffy, pedantic, and generally a waste of a good nap, you are right. Most of the people on this list couldn’t understand his writing if someone held your head under Walden Pond until you cried uncle. For the couple who could grasp it, try it. (You know who you are. I don’t want to embarrass you by pointing you out.) He was really not just a nature lover. He was also a serious revolutionary. He was quite controversial. He supported John Brown, was very anti-government, and generally a strange character. I would have enjoyed his company. I have enjoyed his work. In a way, he was like Daryl, (For those of you who know Daryl.) if Daryl had gone to Harvard and was capable of stringing 6 words together in the form of a sentence.

I read:
Natural History of Massachusetts, (1842)
A Winter Walk (1843)
The Maine Woods(1848) Very good.
Civil Disobedience (1849) This is where his genius most shined. (He agrees with me a lot here….)
A week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)
A Yankee in Canada (1853)
Walden (1854)
Journal (1858)
Walking (1862)
Life Without Principle(1863)
Cape Cod(1864)
The Last Days of John Brown(1860)

Seriously worthwhile reading for those of you who can understand the vocabulary and keep your mind open to the ideas involved. His thoughts today are still a bit too deep for most, I am afraid.

“There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted. It is human. It is divine carrion. If I knew for certain that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life…..” Heady stuff, for then and for today. To rebuke philanthropy as being selfish, which he also does, takes a very broad mind. This, and his dislike of governments convinced me of his worth as a writer and thinker.

Anyway, back to the trip. We get moving, and the journey is supposed to be about 28 hours. I am going about 1000 miles. I will be inside the arctic circle by a couple of hundred miles.

To orient yourselves, I am in St. Petersburg. (Russia…..not Florida…. Russia…..) I am at a line of latitude roughly the equivelant of Fairbanks Alaska. I was to be going to a line roughly just at the northern edge of Alaska. I was going to be just east of Laplandia. Laplandia is the home of Santa Claus. (Here, they call him Grandfather Frost.)

Seriously, in Laplandia, there is an industry built from it being the home of Santa Claus. Sort of a Hannibal Mo. Thing, but of ole Saint Nick. People go there, see things, (God knows what.) and enjoy the reindeer, snow, lack of daylight, etc. I was going just on the other side of some mountains from Laplandia.

After about 10 minutes, our train stopped at a station called Volnostroy. I got out, took a couple of pictures, saw nothing worthwhile, and came back to my cabin and began to try to exhaust the provisions Lena and her mother had prepared. I had a small bag for clothes, and a suitcase for food. I had porkchops, eggs, cheese, bread, soda, a whole cake, cut into pieces, and I don’t remember what else. It was fairly exhausting getting it to the train, but Lena held up well under its burden…..

I decided to go walking through the train, and see if I could find anything or anyone interesting.

Rusian trains are nice. I enjoy riding them. I usually get a first class cabin, which is either 2 or 4 bunks in a room with a door. You have an attendant, which sometimes are young, pretty girls, but on this train they seemed to have the ‘retirement soon’ crowd working. I don’t want to say that they were old, but one of them dated Ivan the Terrible. There are about 12 cabins in a car. A nice, comfortable way to travel.

On the second class car, there are more beds, and no doors. Still not terrible, but not as refined. There are bunks everywhere, hanging, folding out, folding in, but not too bad. This aint exactly how the Jews got to Auschwitz.

In one of the second class cars, I met a young group of kids returning to Murmansk after receiving a sound thrashing here in St. Petersburg. They were a judo club, and there were about 20 of them. Two of them were proud to tell me they won silver medals, and one told me he won bronze. That means they all got whupped, right? Some of them quickly and soundly I am guessing. No matter, they were young, and on the road. They were having a good time.

At our second stop, things got a bit better. A nice, pretty blonde became the fourth in our cabin. She was a teacher, and heading home to Kandelazhda. (A town just inside the arctic circle.) Her name was Lidia, and she was very friendly, although she spoke no English.

These trains stop a lot. About every half hour or so, they stop, load on a few people, offload a few, and go on. Most stops are only for one or two minutes, (And they MEAN it.) and they go on. Some are for longer though. We had about 5 stops which were 15 minutes or longer. No stop on this train was more than 20 minutes.

By the way, trains are incredibly accurate on time. I am amazed at how the schedule met the reality of our arrival in places. I have NEVER seen anything like it, and frankly, as much as I like Russia, efficiency has not been one of the hallmarks I have noticed, and the trains running on time surprised me. Maybe they learned it from the fascists.